site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-dev@lists.apple.com Thread-index: AcmdF8+gSeV/ZPSRQ3KzDL3TVKAXXgAAXo6w That was my first thought, but we have a requirement that the value persist across installs, and I don't like leaving a preference file behind on uninstalls. So, using one or more of these values seems to be the best solutions. I'm just trying to find out if Apple is moving away from Mac addresses for this purpose. With no real documentation on the IOPlatformUUID value I think I will use a combination of the Mac address and serial number a unique ID string. I may factor in the IOPlatformUUID value if for some reason the serial number is missing. ___________________________________ Thomas Fortmann Director of Development Xcape Solutions, Inc. 207 Crystal Grove Blvd. Lutz, FL 33548 TEL 847 228 9831 www.xcapesolutions.net tfortmann@xcapesolutions.net -----Original Message----- From: Terry Lambert [mailto:tlambert@apple.com] Sent: Wednesday, March 04, 2009 4:23 PM To: Tom Fortmann Cc: darwin-dev@lists.apple.com Subject: Re: Recommendations on uniquely identifying a system. 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:

1. Primary MAC Address 2. IOPlatformSerialNumber 3. IOPlatformUUID value

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? -- 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... This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com