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Client MachineGUID


Ccssrs69

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I'm looking for the best possible way to do a per terminal license. Currently the web site writes a GUID to the registry every time a client computer is register with the web site. The problem that is occurring is in Window Vista, 7, and thin clients. In vista and 7 it creates a virtual store entry instead of writing to the local machine in the registry plus you need the rights to do this. I want to get completely away from writing to the registry and pull something unique to identify the computer with limited access. There are a number of possible solution to my problem, but unsure of the best solution. Can someone explain to be what the differences of using a MAC Address, Machine SID, or MachineGUID.Like if I will need Admin Privileges or not - if something is going to have to be installed on the client machine like ActiveX - and the OS that these will work on.Thanks in advance for any and all answers

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There's no way to get any of these without an ActiveX control running (in the case of a MAC address) and/or Admin privilages (in the case of Machine SID or GUID... I think).I'm not sure about the difference between SID and GUID though... I thought those were both the same kind of unique identifier per motherboard... except maybe if one of those means a CPU serial number or HDD serial number. Either way - can't get them without an ActiveX control, and you can't install an ActiveX control without admin privilages.A MAC address only identifies uniquely the LAN card in the client's network. MAC addresses may not be unique in different networks, but if your application is for an intranet, then go ahead and compare by MAC (+ SID?). If the MAC address is going to be sent to a central server, you'll have to make sure you do some additional checks along, such as the IP and/or a username.

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More on the lines of tracking the machine itself. I really don't care about how many user there are, basically want to limit the computers that access the site. I also don't want a concurrent license because of being able to track the PC.

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If you want to track more than Windows users, then you can't use the registry, and you can't use ActiveX. That means you can't use the MAC address or any machine GUID. That leaves you with things like IP address, which you can't use to reliably detect a single machine. As far as I'm aware of there's no way to reliably do this online. You can gather a lot of information through Javascript, such as the fonts they have installed, certain plugins, OS and version, etc, and you may be able to consider all of that data that as a "fingerprint" for the machine, but if they installed or removed a font or plugin then that data would change.

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