Solution for "Hostid 00000000000" on Red Hat 6 and Fedora15

THIS INFORMATION ONLY PERTAINS TO SOFTWARE VERSIONS IDL 8.5, ENVI 5.3 AND PRIOR

UPDATE: Please note that this error was resolved in ENVI 5.0 SP 3 and IDL 8.2.3 as well as subsequent releases.  If you are encountering this problem, please upgrade to the latest version available which should correct the issue.  For assistance, please contact Harris Geospatial Technical Support.

When trying to activate ENVI/IDL on Fedora Core 15 or Red Hat 6, the license activation fails or errors out. Manually checking the Host ID shows that the Host ID is 000000000000, which will not allow FlexLM products to be licensed. The reason for the hostid displaying as "00000000000" on Fedora 15 and Red Hat 6, is they both use a new technology, BIOSDEV, that alters the network device naming. The changes to the network naming removes the standard ethX method, and adds something similar to emX. 

Fedora has documented this change on their website here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ConsistentNetworkDeviceNaming 

The following is an excerpt from Fedora's link listed above, on the issue and possibles resolutions :

Existing installations upgraded to Fedora 15 will not see a change in names unless /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules is deleted and the HWADDR lines are removed from all /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* files, and those files are renamed to use the new device names.
You may continue to write rules in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules to change the device names to anything you wish. Such will take precedence over this physical location naming scheme. Such rules may look like:

SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="00:11:22:33:44:55", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="public" 

This feature may be disabled by passing "biosdevname=0" on the kernel command line, in which case, behavior will revert to using ethX names. Upgrading from an earlier version of Fedora (including 15-Alpha or -Beta) to Fedora 15 may result in a change of network device names from an earlier biosdevname naming scheme to the final naming scheme described here. Configuration files must be manually adjusted accordingly.

Red Hat also had some further documentation here on the new BIOSDEV renaming:
http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Deployment_Guide/appe-Consistent_Network_Device_Naming.html 

Red Hat does provide more in depth instructions on how to disable the network device renaming here:
http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Deployment_Guide/sect-Consistent_Network_Device_Naming-Enabling_and_Disabling.html 

Below is the context of the above link from Red Hat
To disable the consistent network device naming on systems that would normally have it on by default, pass the following option on the boot command line, both during and after installation:

biosdevname=0

Activating ENVI/IDL and using the license manager require a network device that is named ethX where ethX is the lowest numbered eth device (ex: eth0, or eth1). Using other naming conventions will not allow ENVI/IDL to be successfully license and will result in an further errors. The BIOSDEV will need to be disabled and the naming devices reverted back to normal in order to get your product successfully licensed.
 
Outside of Fedora and Red Hat's links, we have found the following to work as a last result :
 
yum remove biosdevname
 
This will completely remove the BIOSDEV package from your system and revert it back to the normal network device naming.

_{updated/reviewed 5/15/14 JD SM}