Thread Subject: Is there a way to identify unique computers?

Hello all,
     I've been working on a distributed computing toolbox because buying the real one is not an option. Unfortunately, an intern is cheaper than having X seats on your license - although I do enjoy working on my programming skills. My program is pretty simple: one master computer will give out jobs and any number of slave computers will receive jobs, compute stuff, and send results back to the master computer.
     I currently have all of the slaves load a cell array that contains a list of all of the workspaces (job pathnames) and edit the string of the corresponding index they are working on so other slaves skip over it. They save 'Current' when they are working on a job and 'Complete' when they finish. The master looks for 'Complete' in the cell array and writes the data in the corresponding index to an Excel file.
    As you can imagine loading and saving many many times will incur some serious overhead across a network. I can't think of a simple way to identify individual computers automatically. I thought about getting the IP address of each computer, but it won't work on VPN since all will have common addresses...
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/newsreader/view_thread/292100

   Is there something simple that is unique to each computer that can be used as an identifier?

      Thanks for any help,
                Maxx

"Maxx Chatsko" wrote in message <itsvet$1ce$1@newscl01ah.mathworks.com>...
> Hello all,
> I've been working on a distributed computing toolbox because buying the real one is not an option. Unfortunately, an intern is cheaper than having X seats on your license - although I do enjoy working on my programming skills. My program is pretty simple: one master computer will give out jobs and any number of slave computers will receive jobs, compute stuff, and send results back to the master computer.
> I currently have all of the slaves load a cell array that contains a list of all of the workspaces (job pathnames) and edit the string of the corresponding index they are working on so other slaves skip over it. They save 'Current' when they are working on a job and 'Complete' when they finish. The master looks for 'Complete' in the cell array and writes the data in the corresponding index to an Excel file.
> As you can imagine loading and saving many many times will incur some serious overhead across a network. I can't think of a simple way to identify individual computers automatically. I thought about getting the IP address of each computer, but it won't work on VPN since all will have common addresses...
> http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/newsreader/view_thread/292100
>
> Is there something simple that is unique to each computer that can be used as an identifier?
>
> Thanks for any help,
> Maxx


Maybe the MAC address or the hard drive serial number would work? Though I suppose your method for figuring out what those are will depend on your operating system...

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/15718-getsid-get-unique-windows-id

or:
get(com.sun.security.auth.module.NTSystem,'DomainSID')

Yair Altman
http://UndocumentedMatlab.com

"Yair Altman" wrote in message <ittgat$ook$1@newscl01ah.mathworks.com>...
> http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/15718-getsid-get-unique-windows-id
>
> or:
> get(com.sun.security.auth.module.NTSystem,'DomainSID')
>
> Yair Altman
> http://UndocumentedMatlab.com

Yair this is great!

And it -IP address identification- may or may not work on VPN and local networks. Although, each computer should have a unique identifier within the IP address. Yair's solution works great it certain cases too (below)

get(com.sun.security.auth.module.NTSystem,'DomainSID')

Maxx

I just posted an article explaining all this, plus a solution for non-Windows platforms:
http://UndocumentedMatlab.com/blog/unique-computer-id/

Yair Altman
http://UndocumentedMatlab.com