Best way to get machine id on Linux?

Question

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

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

On modern machines with systemd machine id is created by systemd-machine-id-setup and it's location is more standard and with standardized format. Just:

cat /etc/machine-id

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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
...