Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!dewey.soe.berkeley.edu!oster
From: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (David Phillip Oster)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: How do you get a "Unique" Mac ID...
Message-ID: <27725@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 25 Jan 89 01:51:18 GMT
References: <20963@ames.arc.nasa.gov>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster)
Organization: School of Education, UC-Berkeley
Lines: 11

It depends on what you need it for.  If you want an immutable, unspoofable
number for copy protection, I don't know of anything that will do it for
you. If you need it to be unique on a network, appletalk's distributed
name server will give you a unique socket numbe for each mac on the net.
Lastly, the Map CDEV stores the latitude and longitude of the mac in the
parameter ram is a 32-bit fraction of a great circle, which gives a
positioning on the Earth of a few feet. This lets you asign permanent
unique ids to any set of macintoshes under your control, but the user
can changes these numbers, if only by removing the battery that backs up
the parameter RAM. Ithink Mac 512KEs don't have enough parameter RAM to store
these values.