From owner-freebsd-current Wed Sep 25 00:24:37 1996 Return-Path: owner-current Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id AAA02525 for current-outgoing; Wed, 25 Sep 1996 00:24:37 -0700 (PDT) Received: from whale.gu.kiev.ua (news.gu.net [193.124.51.77]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id AAA01498; Wed, 25 Sep 1996 00:23:15 -0700 (PDT) Received: from creator.gu.kiev.ua (stesin@creator.gu.kiev.ua [193.124.51.73]) by whale.gu.kiev.ua (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id KAA28952; Wed, 25 Sep 1996 10:19:16 +0300 Date: Wed, 25 Sep 1996 10:19:16 +0300 (EET DST) From: Andrew Stesin X-Sender: stesin@creator.gu.kiev.ua To: "Rodney W. Grimes" cc: Ulf Zimmermann , jhs@FreeBSD.org, current@FreeBSD.org, serious@FreeBSD.org, commercial@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Licensing Software In-Reply-To: <199609250320.UAA01584@GndRsh.aac.dev.com> Message-ID: X-NCC-RegID: ua.gu MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-current@FreeBSD.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > > Kind of a neat but dirty way is to take the CRC of the system BIOS and the VGA > > BIOS. Problem with it is only if the card get's exchanged, etc. > > And now a days given that all modern motherboards have flash BIOSes a > user is _very_ likely to change it causing this method to fail. 'course. Pity Intel didn't think on burning a unique CPU ID into each chip they made. Even PDP11 had this. What can be thought to become a unique FreeBSD machine ID, anyway? I can think on a MD5 checksum of the following things together: CPU type; motherboard chipset ID (if available); manufacturer's ID of a primary HDD; primary disk controller' ID (if available); OS kernel version (?); canonical hostname. And it's hard for me to think about anything else in a PC world that one might depend upon. PC is not a Sun. :( Best, Andrew