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On Tue, 6 Nov 2001, Theo Van Dinter wrote:
Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2001 09:42:20 -0500 From: Theo Van Dinter <felicity@kluge.net> Reply-To: wlug@mail.wlug.org To: wlug@mail.wlug.org Subject: Re: [Wlug] Unique ID
On Mon, Nov 05, 2001 at 08:00:11PM -0500, Peter Nikolla wrote:
I am tiring to right a locking mechanism for my program. I wanted to find something unique on a Linux/Unix system that I could read to lock my code to that machine. Does anyone know of a call I can make to get an unique ID like a disk ID, or system ID?
I'll agree with Keith on this one, it's fairly impossible to do if you're doing software-only, and probably isn't a good idea anyway. All you'll end up doing is ticking people off as they change system information around on you to bypass the "copy protection". Even semi-devious tricks like locking on root filesystem UUID (which I think would be cool to play with once or twice but not actually use for real code) can be easily fooled by something like tune2fs, if the underlying filesystem has UUIDs at all (ext[23] and XFS do, but does JFS, reiser, etc?)
There are valid reasons besides software license locking to want to know if you are on a specific machine. Sometimes utilities just need to know, and, considering that a machine may be aliased, it can sometimes be tricky to get good info. <opinion> Also, there are valid reasons for licensing and selling/leasing some products. I used to work for a company which sold a very high-value, small customer base mechanical engineering product. This product would never exist as an open source product because it took too much work to make the product. Although I believe in the open source model, I don't think it's all-encompassing. Some products just need income in order to live. </opinion> Bill