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What is the best-practiced way to get an unique machine ID in GNU/Linux for i386 architecture?

Are there any good ways except the mac address?

jww
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4 Answers4

45

Depending on your kernel, the DMI information may be available via sysfs. Try those:

# cat /sys/class/dmi/id/board_serial
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
# cat /sys/class/dmi/id/product_uuid
xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx

or using a tool

# dmidecode -s baseboard-serial-number
...
# dmidecode -s system-uuid
...
c00kiemon5ter
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11

On modern machines with systemd: machine id is created by systemd-machine-id-setup. The location of machine id is documented - in freedesktop machine-id and man machine-id and machine id has a more standardized format - see RFC4122. Just:

cat /etc/machine-id
KamilCuk
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6

You can use lshal. This needs hal (apt-get install hal or yum install hal) to be installed first. This way you can access all the info of dmidecode without root permissions.

A non-root equivalent of

# dmidecode | grep -i uuid

will be

$ lshal |grep -i system.hardware.uuid

And similarly other info as per your needs.

adnan kamili
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    If `lshal` is available on said system, this means `hal` is installed, which means `dbus` is installed. Therefore it is simply `cat /var/lib/dbus/machine-id` – malat Mar 05 '15 at 11:26
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    @malat it is clear from the question that user wants to generate a uuid which is permanent and doesn't change. "dbus/machine-id" can even change after every reboot. – adnan kamili Mar 13 '15 at 17:35
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    Is machine-id useful for licensing beside mac? – user4271704 Aug 10 '17 at 15:49
0

A simple and portable way of computing your own sysid may be to serialize uname(), gethostid() and some inodes like /home or your application homedir (obtained with stat()) etc. in a string and hash It.

andrelsm
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