Hello,
Marvell site says that Sheevaplug can be sell with a unique ID.
Can anyone explain how it works ?
maurizio
Where on the Marvell site?
uhm...actually it wasn't the marvel site
sorry
It was this one
http://www.highseclabs.com/sheeva_plug_sp1100.html (maybe one competitor of yours?)
Anyway do you think you can provide a software accessible unique S/N for copyright protection ?
maurizio
Well, the "unique ID" could be something as simple as the system name. On the uncustomised plugs that we supply, the system name is "debian" (only slightly confusing; the installed O/S is Ubuntu). IIRC the UBIFS customisation uses system name of "ubuntu"; you can easily change the name and it's something we would probably recommend.
Other customisations
might be possible from U-Boot; when you mess with the boot method using the "installer" it is necessary to configure the MAC address of your ethernet port. (And the MAC address is theoretically unique). So other data
could be customised in a similar way, although I am not certain how it would be retrieved. Environment variables and/or kernel boot options could probably be set from U-Boot, but if U-Boot itself were not accessible - i.e. on an OEM device that lacked the JTAG / miniport - then presumably the data could not be changed after the unit were manufactured. That still leads to the question of what kind of data can be read-only and how it could be retrieved (programatically), and I don't have enough specialised programming knowledge to answer that without some research.
By all means ask the highseclabs people exactly what they mean, it might be interesting to learn.
