Determining MAC address or Serial Number

Hi,

I'm trying to find a way to be able to uniquely identify each device in a PC and was hoping to use either serial or MAC for this purpose.

I've looked at the documentation but can't find a generic way to read back serial numbers or MAC addresses from V4L devices? Does such a function exist?

Thanks,

Lou

Lou Otway wrote, On 10/30/2009 10:40 AM:

Hi Lou,

I'm using the mac address to identify each device and to do so I created this script which use dvbnet to create network interface from the dvb card.

a=<your adapter>
n=<your net device>
for ex. /dev/dvb/adapter1/net0 => a=1, n=0

# get mac address
iface=$(sudo /usr/bin/dvbnet -a $a -n $n -p 0 | awk '/device/ {print $3}')
sleep 1
mac_address=$(/sbin/ifconfig $iface | awk '/HWaddr/ {print $5}' | tr -d
':' | tr A-Z a-z)
num=$(sudo /usr/bin/dvbnet -a $a -n $n -l | grep 'Found device ' | awk
'{print $3}' | tr -d ':')
sleep 1
sudo /usr/bin/dvbnet -a $a -n $n -d $num 1> /dev/null

AFAIK, mac address are known only from the kernel and are not directly exposed to the userland. I you manage to do something "cleaner", let me know :)

Regards

pierre gr.

Thanks Pierre,

Unfortunately only some of my devices reported a MAC address, I guess that not all drivers have this feature built in. I think the same problem will hold true for serial devices so I will look at another way to list my devices.

I was thinking to use lshw or lspci to give me a list of devices, from that I can build my own table of devices each one with a unique value to differentiate it from others. My worry is that the output from lshw or lspci isn't sufficiently detailed to allow me to differentiate between devices.

Thanks,

Lou