Re: generating a Linux WWN?

David Miller
2007-10-07T02:46:26Z

From: James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@SteelEye.com>
Date: Sat, 06 Oct 2007 09:11:10 -0500

> My problem with auto generated is that it's provably impossible to
> generate globally unique numbers for WWNs without some internal source
> of uniqueness (I know sparcs have this in their serial number, but most
> PCs unfortunately don't).

If you have at least one ethernet NIC, you have at least one
globally unique MAC address, which is 6 bytes of uniqueness to
draw from.

I'm sure there are countless other possibilities.

I think the SAN issue is way overstated. Sure it's real, but
so are SHA conflicts in the kernel GIT repository.