On 16/09/2013 15:00, Paul Sandoz wrote:
Hi Peter,
Nice observation about name resolving.
On my MacBook, if i switch off the wifi, then 7 addresses are returned 4 for
the en0 and 3 for lo0. Seems overkill to use all of them and the
sub-interefaces, if any. I agree with Doug, selecting the first interface's MAC
address is probably sufficient.
We periodically come across environments where they are a lot (as in
hundreds) of network interfaces configured and might indeed be overkill
to use bits from all of them.
On getHardwareAddress then there are platforms where you need to be root
or have special privileges to get the mac address so this is one reason
why it might return null. I see Doug's patch handles this and I'm just
mentioning in that it may not be source of bits in some environments.
For the security manager case there is a permission check to avoid
leaking details about the environment to untrusted code. So to be useful
when running with a security manager will require it to be done as a
privileged action.
-Alan.
