>>>>> "Dan" == Dan Mahoney <Dan> writes: Dan> Hey all, I'm trying to create an inventory script for systems Dan> that will be loaded via net-boot. I was wondering if there was Dan> any useful way to obtain the serial number of devices like the Dan> hard drives, processor, and/or motherboard. (as far as I can Dan> guess, those are the only things likely to store a serial number Dan> in a machine-readable format).
Dan> I'm scripting in perl, but of course have nothing against making Dan> system calls to get at the low-level stuff. Dan> Please email me, as I'm not subscribed. Certainly the canonical way to get a serial number is the ethernet hardware address. On some cards, you can change it, but many copy protection systems work on MAC addresses. Now, most cards reset to their default MAC address on boot, so if you run early enough, you should be fairly immune from tomjiggery. ifconfig prints it out, among other commands. The reason this is doubly good now is that most motherboards have ethernet built in... so you could consider it (for the purposes of inventory) a motherboard serial number. Now... if there's more than one interface showing up, I can't tell you an easy way to "know" which one is built in. Heh. Dave. -- ============================================================================ |David Gilbert, Independent Contractor. | Two things can only be | |Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | equal if and only if they | |http://daveg.ca | are precisely opposite. | =========================================================GLO================ _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
