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uniquely identifying a machine...

Christopher Swingley cswingle at iarc.uaf.edu
Mon Mar 10 12:18:40 EST 2003 
Chris,

* Chris Spencer <clspence at one.net> [2003-Mar-10 08:01 AKST]:
> I have a need, for licensing purposes, to be able to uniquely identify 
> a machine.  For various policy reasons, we can not rely on the TCP/IP 
> stack being active.  So uniquely identifying a machine by IP address, 
> machine name, or NIC address is not possible.

Dunno whether this would work through a reboot, but on a Linux machine 
(assuming you don't have two machines with identical hardware), you 
might be able to do something like:

    $ cat /proc/cpuinfo /proc/pci | md5sum

or better, parse /proc/cpuinfo and /proc/pci in a more intelligent way.  
I'm not sure how consistent bogomips and other CPU measures are, nor am 
I sure if the hardware order is fixed between reboots (both of which 
would alter the md5sum).

Chris
-- 
Christopher S. Swingley           email: cswingle at iarc.uaf.edu
IARC -- Frontier Program          Please use encryption.  GPG key at:
University of Alaska Fairbanks    www.frontier.iarc.uaf.edu/~cswingle
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