On Wed, 15 Dec 2004, Aleksandar Milivojevic wrote: > Matthew Saltzman wrote: > > The primary (eth0 in Linux) that the machine shipped with (not so > > unreasonable for Suns), or that was installed at the time the license key > > was generated. An alternative might be a hard disk serial number, except > > that low-level system calls are probably needed in order to get it. > > The only solution would be generating /etc/hostid during install. It > can be populated by last four bytes of eth0 (as detected during > install), or some randomly generated bytes (if there's no network > interfaces detected during install). > > Of course, there's still problem what to return if user deletes > /etc/hostid file ;-) And for a license manager that depends on it to identify the machine, there's the problem of users copying /etc/hostid from machine to machine, not to mention the fact that there's nothing stopping the distro from generating the same /etc/hostid for every installation. Conclusion: Using the hostid to identify a machine is silly. Why do proprietary licensing systems persist in doing so? -- Matthew Saltzman Clemson University Math Sciences mjs AT clemson DOT edu http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs
