in reply to Random, Unique, but Simple session ID

Combine the time of day, the process ID number, and the IP address of the host.

If you really need the IDs to be random, then generate a random number, and the three items above, and use them as input to the MD5 checksum algorithm.

  • Comment on Re: Random, Unique, but Simple session ID

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Re: Random, Unique, but Simple session ID
by sachmet (Scribe) on Apr 13, 2001 at 21:33 UTC
    Technically, that could work. As long as you're not going to have 32K sessions per second, that seems fairly unique. Problem is, I believe the poster wanted random. There's many ways you could run into race conditions in this case. I say it depends on the application as to the source of randomness and uniqueness. For example, if using a database that supports sequences, you could MD5-encrypt a sequence number with a random password, and that'd be both unique and random, as well as fairly simple. Without more information, it's difficult, though.

    Update: Double posted; this should be under this node instead.
    Update2: Second post had MD5 note added whereas first didn't.
[reply]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom