Norton, Chris <chrisn at Kronos.com> said:
>You make good sense in your analysis of UUIDs, but I'd like to point out
>that IP addresses are not necessarily unique either.  In my company, for
>example, the I.S. department is always messing around with those things
>(causing endless problems for me).  On many occasions I have discovered that
>there are 2 (or more!) machines on our network that have the same IP
>address!
>
That and the big success of NAT (putting 80% of the world's machines on the
handful of reserved private IP numbers) is probably the reason that lot of
UUID generators just take the one-in-(2 raisedTo: 128) chance of generating a
duplicate one.

(the best approach is probably to leave it up to the system administrator: if
he says that the IP address is unique and the environment can access the
process id, that's the best solution; if not, use random numbers).


-- 
Cees de Groot               http://www.cdegroot.com     <cg at cdegroot.com>
GnuPG 1024D/E0989E8B 0016 F679 F38D 5946 4ECD  1986 F303 937F E098 9E8B
Cogito ergo evigilo