site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-dev@lists.apple.com 1. Primary MAC Address 2. IOPlatformSerialNumber 3. IOPlatformUUID value -- Terry _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-dev mailing list (Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-dev/site_archiver%40lists.appl... On Mar 4, 2009, at 12:39 PM, Tom Fortmann wrote: I'm looking for recommendations on the best or most current way of uniquely identifying a system when registering with a server application. To date I've found three pieces of data that might do the job: The MAC address and serial number are both well documented in the technical note TN1103. The platform UUID value I found using the IORegistryExplorer along with some references online regarding byhost preferences. Not sure what that is, but based on the article it sounds like this is the preferred value (over MAC address) for this purpose. Does anyone have more insight on this value and its intended use? The one thing that scares me is a posting I found for a problem with this value changing on every boot. As a little background I'm not looking to use this for licensing or DRM. We're just using it to register our agents with a back-end server that collects status information. So, it needs to be fairly stable and very unique. If it changes with a hardware update or OS reload we are OK with a new entry. The old one will age out of the system. But we don't want to end up with multiple systems using the same value. If this is your criteria, then why not just generate your own UUID the first time you run and squirrel it away in a plist in your app somewhere, so it's relatively persistent over a given installation of the OS? This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com