Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2006 15:30:40 -0400 From: Garance A Drosehn <gad@FreeBSD.org> To: Antony Mawer <fbsd-questions@mawer.org>, "Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@FreeBSD.org> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: BSDstats Project v2.0 ... Message-ID: <p06230912c0ffe4100c7c@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <44D91F02.90107@mawer.org> References: <20060807003815.C7522@ganymede.hub.org> <20060808102819.GB64879@augusta.de> <20060808153921.V7522@ganymede.hub.org> <44D8EC98.8020801@utdallas.edu> <20060808201359.S7522@ganymede.hub.org> <44D91F02.90107@mawer.org>
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At 9:32 AM +1000 8/9/06, Antony Mawer wrote:
>
>What if we improved upon this - if instead of storing
>the hostname and IP address, we stored a one-way hash
>of this information? OpenSSH in recent versions takes
>the same approach with its authorized_keys files...
A scattered list of ideas:
It might be useful to keep part of the domain-name
in plain-text. Just a minimal part, such as '.edu'
or '.co.uk'. So that would be one value sent/saved.
Then have an MD5 hash of `hostname` (hashing the full
hostname, including full domain), or maybe a hash of
the output from: hostname ; ifconfig | grep ether
Eg: hostname ; ifconfig | grep ether
freefour.acs.rpi.edu
ether 00:09:5b:01:02:03
ether 00:11:09:09:08:07
(this machine has two ethernet cards in it, and no,
those are not the real MAC addresses of the cards... :-)
==> (hostname ; ifconfig | grep ether) | md5
0670be39b40dc52d996e1a6dcee6cca7
Maybe combine that with the partial-domain, to get
0670be39b40dc52d996e1a6dcee6cca7.edu
Further, whatever value you decide to use to create a
unique value, you could just save that value away in
some file under /var/db . If the file does not exist,
then create it and store the probably-unique value.
That way you can pick some algorithm which should
produce a unique result, and not worry if the value
of that algorithm might change (on a single machine)
over time. You'll only calculate it once, and then
keep using that result.
--
Garance Alistair Drosehn = drosehn@rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer or gad@FreeBSD.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Troy, NY; USA
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