Hi, Mark,
mark@mark.mielke.cc wrote:
> The versions that include a MAC address, time, and serial number for
> the machine come pretty close, presuming that the user has not
> overwritten the MAC address with something else. It's unique at
> manufacturing time.
Not even that is guaranteed. I remember that, about 8 years ago, me and
a co-student bought a cheap "network starting kit" each, containing two
network kards and a crossover cable.
Now, it turned out, that the first cards in both packages had the same
mac address, and the second cards as well, so we could not network
together using proper cabling and a hub.
Luckily, the mac address was flashable in an eeprom, and so my friend
"fixed" his hards with those from two 10 MBit Coax cards we had
abandoned in favour of the new twisted pair network.
AFAIR, in the end it turned out that the whole charge of cards was
manufactured this way. Officially, it was a bug in the eeprom content
generating software, but there were rumours that the manufacturer wanted
to avoid paying the registration fees for the mac address ranges...
Just gettin' off topic,
Markus
--
Markus Schaber | Logical Tracking&Tracing International AG
Dipl. Inf. | Software Development GIS
Fight against software patents in Europe! www.ffii.org
www.nosoftwarepatents.org