SCO UNIX, getting the real enet address (48bits)

[Dr R.P. Alston]

Although this question relates currently to the SCO UNIX boxes, we are going
to have to answer this same question on more platforms and UNIX's in the
future. Any general suggestions are welcome, this approach has been currently
chosen because the ubiquitous IBM PC architecture does not have any mechanism
to uniquely identify a box (any [34]86 clone walks, talks and smells like any
other clone), unlike other machines such as SUN's that have
unique ID's in ROM.

We have an application that would like to obtain a unique node
identity that is difficult to forge. We would like to be able to
obtain the 48 bit ethernet address for a given board in SCO [34]86
UNIX (3.2) machines which have the lachman tcp-ip installed. Is there
some mechanism in existence that allows a request to convert on a
given machine an internet address to the ethernet address of the board
that supports that INET address? Ideally this would be able
to move forward in the future to other interfaces, and whatever makes
them unique.

We have done this on other machines (SVR4 386) but have had to develop
a driver that goes and mucks with the ARP tables to find the entry
that corresponds to a given INET address, since the arp program, nor
the ioctls associated with arp do not typically provide a way to get
the local ethernet address (after all it knows who it is doesn't it?).
I thought that inquiring here before I go off the deep end again would
be worthwhile.

I was wondering if anyone knows or understands this copy protection
scheme (cpd) that SCO has implemented to know if it provides this
mechanism or not.

Thankyou for any help, save the NET please e-mail responses.

robin

-- 
Dr Robin P. Alston,
Principal Member, Technical Staff,
Gradient Technologies,
robin at gradient.com