Re: Getting a unique ID for a system?

[Tom Allison <tom@tacocat.net>]

Richard Hartmann wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 19:04, Steve Kemp <skx@debian.org> wrote:
>
> >  hostid - contained in the coreutils package.
>
> Unfortunately, this id is either read from /etc/hostid or calculated
> from the IPv4 address which a gethostbyhostname_r(3) on the
> system's hostname returns.
> This means the id is not persistant.
>
> Thanks though,
> Richard

I've absolutely no idea what you are trying to do here or why.  I'm a 
little curious about that.

But if you are trying to find a unique id that isn't tied to hardware or 
pretty much anything else then why not just make one up.


Here:  I wrote this in the middle of this email:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Time::HiRes qw[gettimeofday];
use Digest::MD5 qw[md5_hex];

my $t = [gettimeofday];
my $h = md5_hex($t, rand());

print "$h,\n";


It will give you a hex uuid that would be hard to collide with.
If you want, mix the hard drive serial number into the md5_hex array.