Hey

How is oz doing for a resolution to the whole punkbuster dropping et? I assume you do not like the current situation of users having to be sent to etkey.org to deal with the issue? I’m not sure what you guys have planned for this, but I have a possible solution to the issue that would not involve players having to work out what to do at etkey.org.

It seems to me the only reason etkeys/guid’s are needed is to ban people and to save xp, if i’m correct in this, I would suggest that you could do the exact same thing using hardware serial numbers and/or mac addresses. These are what punkbuster used to perm ban people anyway so this seems like an ideal solution to me. So this could serve as replacement permanent banning code as well as a replacement guid. I believe I sent BR code a while back that would get the information under linux. On windows it isn’t too hard to sort out something similar, however if you wanted to set it up like i intended to when I was mucking round, so nothing short of fake drivers would allow people to fake who they were then the code on windows becomes a little harder (its easy to get the info from the os under windows but difficult to get it from the hardware, the os info can be changed, the hardware is usually read only memory). Mac i’m not sure about, but i’d imagine it to be quite similar to linux.

The attached file is c code for a pretty badly written implementation under linux, I don’t currently have time to sort out a better process, but it should serve as an example of what could be done.

The mac address code there does not grab the mac address, but the PERMANENT mac address, ie this code asks the driver what the mac address written into the read only memory on the network controller is. This code cannot be spoofed by changing your mac address in software. The only downside to this is i’m not sure that all drivers support this call, so it may be an idea to first try this, and if this fails then try getting the software mac address?

What do peeps think?