On Thu, Sep 06, 2001 at 05:32:00PM +0100, Tim O'Donovan wrote:
> If your machine has an Ethernet card, why not just
> use the MAC Address? That's globally unique. I'm
> pretty sure you could find some C++ code on the web
> to get the MAC address.
the uuidgen mentioned before would be better.
a) mac addresses are only unique on that ethernet network. i know of at
least one company that reused ethernet addresses. i've reused ethernet
addresses in order to fool my cable modem (*sniffle*).
b) multiple users might be on a single machine.
c) there might be 0 or more than one card.
as an aside, a useful tool for generating guid's would be a cpuid.
combine a cpuid, the time (to the millisecond), a users uid and a random
number and you'd be pretty sure it would be the only one. intel nixes
this idea because except for their more modern processors, they don't
have a cpuid. pretty much every other processor has one.
cue ignorant privacy advocates...
kevin
--
kevin at suberic.net simple four line sigs -
fork()'ed on 37058400 bandwidth friendly; nice to do.
meatspace place: home some admins clueless.
http://suberic.net/~kevin --netiquette haiku 2001
Maintained by the ILUG website team. The aim of Linux.ie is to
support and help commercial and private users of Linux in Ireland. You can
display ILUG news in your own webpages, read backend
information to find out how. Networking services kindly provided by HEAnet, server kindly donated by
Dell. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds,
used with permission. No penguins were harmed in the production or maintenance
of this highly praised website. Looking for the
Indian Linux Users' Group? Try here. If you've read all this and aren't a lawyer: you should be!
