A few comments.
1. A GUID is not intrinsically related to a MAC address. A lot of
press has been devoted to GUIDs and MAC addresses, however, because
of Microsoft's implementation of GUIDs which _do_ incorporate
MAC addresses. Although a MAC address is not itself unique (as
others have observed; there _can_ be NIC collisions), Microsoft
presumably wanted its GUIDs to be traceable back to individual
computers, and perhaps to individual users - so the MAC address
became part of Microsoft's GUIDs. (And GUIDs got a bad reputation
in privacy circles - incorrectly, of course; it's Microsoft's
_use_ of GUIDs which is the root of this problem.)
See (for instance) http://www.junkbusters.com/ht/en/microsoft.html
- the sections beginning at "Microsoft and the GUID".
2. In a former life I worked on an archiving product, in which there
was a need to provide a GUID for every record entered into the
archive. We needed _lots_ of GUIDs. They didn't depend on MACs,
but were of course created by code. (Which I don't have access to.
It may have been proprietary, anyway.)
3. There does exist code in the Free Software community to create
GUIDs. See, for instance, man uuidgen - at least on my Debian
system. (Deeper down is the uuid library, which in turn seems
be part of the e2fsprogs package.)
Hope this is helpful -
Bill
*****************************************************************
To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body.
*****************************************************************
