Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!world!decwrl!wuarchive!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!sun!coherent!next!king
From: king@next.com (Peter King)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Computer Readible serial number....
Message-ID: <266@next.com>
Date: 20 Oct 90 01:24:08 GMT
References: <46811@cornell.UUCP>
Reply-To: Peter_King@NeXT.COM (My Account)
Organization: NeXT Computer, Inc.
Lines: 20

In article <46811@cornell.UUCP> wayner@kama.cs.cornell.edu (Peter Wayner) writes:
>The Sun computers come with an individual serial number stored in
>EEPROM that is accessible via the operating system calls. This
>makes generating site licenses easier. Does the NeXT machine
>have anything like this?
>

Yes, NeXT provides the same sort of machine readable serial number.
It is based on the CPU board's ethernet address which by definition is
guaranteed to be unique.

You can get this number with the gethostid() system call.  The first
byte of the number will always be 1.  The last three bytes of the
number will be the same as the last three bytes of the ethernet
address.  Ethernet addresses are six bytes long, a little large for an
int.  NeXT ethernet addresses always have the same IEEE assigned first
three bytes (00:00:0f).

Peter King
Developer Trainer