Unique machine (desktop) id (no admin privileges required).
Cross-platform unique machine (desktop) id discovery
Use cases
Software restrictions
Installation tracking
Features
Hardware independent
Unique within the OS installation
No elevated rights required
No external dependencies and does not require any native bindings
Cross-platform (OSx, Win, Linux)
How it works
Module based on OS native UUID/GUID which used for internal needs.
All others approaches requires elevated rights or much depends on hardware components, but this approach summarize the methods of selecting the most reliable unique identifier
Win32/64 uses key MachineGuid in registry
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Cryptography (can be changed by administrator but with unpredictable consequences)
It is generated during OS installation and won't change unless you make another OS
updates or reinstall. Depending on the OS version it may contain the network adapter
MAC address embedded (plus some other numbers, including random), or a pseudorandom number.
OSx uses IOPlatformUUID (the same Hardware UUID)
ioreg -rd1 -c IOPlatformExpertDevice
Value from I/O Kit registry in IOPlatformExpertDevice class
Linux uses /var/lib/dbus/machine-id (can be changed by root but with unpredictable consequences)
http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/machine-id.5.html
The /var/lib/dbus/machine-id file contains the unique machine ID of the local
system that is set during installation. The machine ID is a single
newline-terminated, hexadecimal, 32-character, lowercase machine ID
string. When decoded from hexadecimal, this corresponds with a
16-byte/128-bit string.
The machine ID is usually generated from a random source during
system installation and stays constant for all subsequent boots.
Optionally, for stateless systems, it is generated during runtime at
early boot if it is found to be empty.
The machine ID does not change based on user configuration or when
hardware is replaced.
Installation
npm install node-machine-id
Usage
Function: machineId(original)
original , If true return original value of machine id, otherwise return hashed value (sha-256), default: false
Function: machineIdSync(original);
syncronous version of machineId
import {machineId, machineIdSync} from 'node-machine-id';
// Asyncronous call with async/await or Promise
async function getMachineId() {
let id = await machineId();
...
}
machineId().then((id) => {
...
})
// Syncronous call
let id = machineIdSync()
// id = c24b0fe51856497eebb6a2bfcd120247aac0d6334d670bb92e09a00ce8169365
let id = machineIdSync({original: true})
// id = 98912984-c4e9-5ceb-8000-03882a0485e4
Caveats
Image-based environments have usually the same machine-idAs a workaround you can generate new machine-ids for each instance (or container) with dbus-uuidgen and changed them in the respective > files: /etc/machine-id and /var/lib/dbus/machine-id. Thanks @stefanhuber
HomePage
Repository
https@github.com:automation-stack/node-machine-id