CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++cross-platform
myWallJSON
myWallJSON

Reputation: 9522

Crossplatform library for uniquely identifying the machine my app is currently running on?

So I have next situation - shared file system, over N alike machines. My app is run on all of them. I need to understand on which machine my app runs in each instance - some unique ID... Is there such thing, is it possible to emulate it? Is there any crossplatform library that would help with that?

Upvotes: 5

Views: 730

Answers (1)

Tom Kerr
Tom Kerr

Reputation: 10730

There are two concerns here, security and stability of your matching.

Hardware characteristics are a good place to start. Things like MAC address, CPU, hdd identifiers.

These things theoretically can change. If a hdd failed you probably would lose whatever configuration you had on the system as well. I could see a system that sent a hash of each characteristic separately work alright. If 4 out of 5 matched, you could probably guess that their network card caught on fire and it was replaced.

If you just need a head count, you may not even be interested that this new system with a different signature used to be another one.

Usually, people aren't too concerned with security with these systems; they just want to track resources on a network. If someone wanted to spoof the hardware identifiers they could. For simple cases, I would look into an installer that registered a salted identifier. If you really need something terribly secure you might start looking at commercial products (or ask another question about the security aspects specifically).

Both of these are error prone obviously. I'm not sure you should even fully automate it in those cases. Think about a case where network cards were behaving weird and you swapped them with another machine.

Human eyes are pretty good, let an administrator use them. At worst, they can probably figure things out with a quick email. Just give them enough information to make an informed decision when something does go wrong. Really, if you just log everything a human should be able to recreate the scenario and make a decision. Most of these things won't change daily. There is more work when hardware fails, not every day.

Upvotes: 1

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