- #Fog project hosts taking usb ethernet adapter mac address serial numbers#
- #Fog project hosts taking usb ethernet adapter mac address code#
#Fog project hosts taking usb ethernet adapter mac address code#
Where I ended up is using a composite ID of manufacturer, product, serial, asset tag, uuid, and mac address and passing them from iPXE to the FOG php code where it would concatenate those fields into a string and then take the md5 of the string to give us a system unique identifier. When I was working on this, the only solution I found was to extend iPXE by adding a few smbios commands that is needed to make a unique composite device identifier. (man 2017 that was almost 2 years ago now) But then again, are the problematic models likely to have a TPM and could that TPM be interacted with during a PXE session? If the data isn't accessible at the iPXE stage, can the non-unique identifier be classed as problematic to be handled as an edge case?įor those identified edge cases, can the data available to iPXE be changed so that the uniqueness issue goes away, possibly via asset tag? I believe the devs behind iPXE say it can't be done permanently from within iPXE, but A) could FOS perform the changes (with smbios-utils or something similar,) B) is that something that FOS should do, and C) would this approach even work for the kinds of devices that have ambiguous identifiers?Ĭould the TPM be leveraged to either locate, generate, or store an identifier? theoretically, there is a unique-ish RSA key that could be used to encrypt a known string. Looking through my last Ghost server (v2.5, some machines I have can't PXE), looks like they use mac addresses I seem to remember Ghost getting quite irritated when I had machines with multiple NICs. I think has a list of default attributes. (and yes I am as much trying to get the information from posts spread out across the forums here as I am trying to spark discussion)
Wouldn't be without it's downsides (troubleshooting and reliably reproducing the identifier in the client come to mind), but could potentially result in more robust identifiers. I'm not very familiar with iPXE, but if a cryptographic hash function is available to the init environment, running a string of those values through that would capture the uniqueness without needing to decide which identifier to use or having to keep track of multiple values. With this many values in play, programmatically choosing one is an option, or could take them all at once. With this in mind along with the other issues brought up in the forums, it seems like using all the available information for the static components (what defines a host) might be useful. Thinking about things, it would probably make sense to start using asset tags for the latter.
#Fog project hosts taking usb ethernet adapter mac address serial numbers#
For those that don't have programmatically accessible serial numbers I have resorted to manual entry, and for those that just don't have a serial number period, I have been known to create an arbitrary serial numbers and grab a sharpie.
Instances have been few and far between and it has been quite a while since I have encountered one, but it is a thing.īecause of these issues, I have had to get things down to a model + serial number arrangement to (mostly) assure a unique identity. I have run across companies that reuse/recycle serial numbers (Dell and IBM / Lenovo come to mind). Serial numbers are not necessarily unique within a company Prime examples of this are unset serial number fields (as discussed in the forums) but I have seen small companies that use literal serial numbers to identify their machines. Serial numbers are not universally unique
A couple of things I have come across inventorying machines where I work (small public university, ~3000 units to date, hodgepodge of manufacturers and system configurations):
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