Serial Number

Harald Becker ralda at gmx.de
Sun May 8 13:13:42 UTC 2011


 Hallo David!

> I'm not quite sure how else I could have specified I was looking for a
> way to obtain serial numbers other than saying "I'm looking for a way
> to obtain serial numbers". ;)

It was just the missing word "product" (or "device"), as "product serial
numbers" are a well known description to that kind of information (at
least to all people I met), where as a "serial number" without any
detailing specification lead me to just a SELF GENERATED sequence of up
counting numbers (N, N+1, N+2 ...) ... as you eliminated that one the
next possible was UUID.

... but nobody is perfect and you did it right to clarify your question
afterwards. Sorry, if my answers gave you not the expected informations.

... but this shows, if in doubt it is always better to give a more
precise example on what you want to achieve. Especially as we are not
all native English talkers and translations may lead to additional
misunderstandings. IMHO


> Based on package updates, I'd say that if there's that much frequent
> change to drive detection between each kernel release, things would
> grind to a halt.  For example, if the serial number detection was as
> problematic as specified above, I'd have to get new versions of udev
> everytime I upgraded to a new kernel (which isn't the case) just to be
> able to have a usable system.

May be you are right and I'm wrong at this, but then I do not know how
that information is extracted from the kernel in a reliable way. Would
be really interesting on how it is done.

So, why do you not look inside udev source to find out how they can
obtain that information you are looking fore ... or may be, ask the udev
maintainers? ... and then post that information here. If you are not
able to provide a patch to extend mdev functionality for this, may be
someone else can do that, if we know how the information retrieval
works. I think that will be the best at that point of discussion.


> What distro(s) are you using?

Distros? ... hmmm, None ... or call it self made or Linux from scratch
... with application packages from Gentoo (nowadays, formerly Debian)
... all compiled from source ... that's the way I did it mostly since
Linux kernel 2.0.0

--
Harald


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