Identifying and editing a variable in memory 4462

On Fri, 12 Aug 2005 23:46:49 +0200, Michael Heiming staggered into the Black Sun and said:

Note: "home PC", which *probably* means that it's sitting on a cable-DSL-dialup link without a static IP. Some people have static IPs at their home machines; this is not common because it costs more than a dynamic IP. Random Penguin has not said whether he has a static or dynamic IP at home. I buttumed dynamic based on statistics and experience and so forth.

unpleasant woman; I should just hang up and go back to 'Doze2K and start

Duh! It's *also* common to have one (or N) machines sitting close to the telco link doing firewall-gateway-routing duty. Then packets coming in are routed to machines on the subnet based on iptables rules or something similar. The machines behind the firewall-gateway don't *have* routable IPs; ifconfig or whatever reports "192.168.X.Y" or "10.X.Y.Z" for all NICs. I know there are several small-mid-sized businesses here in central Michigan with this setup, and at least one large business in Chennai with a similar one. Actually, the only time I've ever seen workstations with routable IPs was at large universities, but that's a pretty special case....

Since Random Penguin has not complained about being able to run this software (whatever it is) on his home system, and his home system probably has a dynamic IP, I believe that it's unlikely the software uses the machine's IP as a key of any sort in a license scheme. The software may "phone home" to vendor.org. The software may grab various information about the hardware it's hooked to (PCI IDs, IDE serial numbers, whatever) and generate a hash from it, then compare that with something stored in an obscure corner of the filesystem. Without more research, it's impossible to tell what's really going on.

So: Random Penguin, do you have a static IP at home? If not, can you run this license-requiring software when you're not hooked to the Net?

That sounds like a good way to lose in the long run. Our static IP allocation here at ork has changed once in 4.8 years. If any of the (lots of) commercial apps many people still need depended on IP addresses, they would've been very peeed off 2.5 years ago.

-- Matt GThere is no Darkness in Eternity-But only Light too dim for us to see Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong ----------------------------- penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL