Wasn't there a thread a while back in which folks reported
that they have seen manufacturers reuse MAC addresses (contrary to the
original intent of the design)?
If this is true then you might want to form an ID which
includes "lowest MAC address", but combines it with other sources of
identity to produce the ID. While hostname, IP address, OS version,
etc., aren't very unique by themselves, combining them with MAC
address should have a better chance of being unique than MAC address
by itself.
If you have local persistant storage on the node you could
also include entropy gathered at install time (like the key generators
do), but such entropy, properly gathered, is probably sufficiently
unique by itself, and you could just use a key from such a key
generator. You'ld probably have to roll your own if you need to
install without a human operator to provide keyboard and/or mouse
entropy.
Anything requiring persistant storage has the problem that if
it becomes necessary to re-install (e.g.; disk crash) then you can't
count on identifying a node as the same as the one before the
re-install, at least without human intervention. But the same is true
of the MAC address only solution if someone needs to replace an
ethernet card, and had never recorded their MAC address, and you allow
them to spoof the old one onto the new card. (I don't think that I
have mine anywhere, unless they're in some log file.)
Bill
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