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Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2006 15:16:29 -0400
From: Bill Moran <wmoran@collaborativefusion.com>
To: Matthew Seaman <m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk>
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Cc: Howard Jones <howie@thingy.com>, "Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@freebsd.org>,
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Subject: Re: BSDstats Project v2.0 ...
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In response to Matthew Seaman <m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk>:

> This problem is intractable: any scheme you can think of to generate a
> unique identifying number on a random host out there on the net will either
> fail to actually be unique, or suffer from mutating over time as machine
> configuration changes.

Really?  What if you just generate some sort of UID or GUID and store it
in /var/db/bsdstats.guid (or similar)?

If the file exists, use it, if it doesn't exist, generate a new ID.

Not 100% error prone, but should be pretty damn reliable.

-- 
Bill Moran
Collaborative Fusion Inc.