Dear Kshitiz,
On Sun, Sep 19, 2010 at 11:55 AM, Kshitiz kshitij_kotak@hotmail.com wrote:
Dear Friends
Want to know how to tie up an installation to a particular HDD.
We do Linux implementations and had seen people ghost the whole harddisks to save on implementation charges. Currently we are using a commercial solution that costs us dear and does not let us bring down the cost of deployment. What we thus require is:
- We can tie up the installation with the hdd serial number with some
command / application that can... a. Check the harddisk serial number before booting (may be through GRUB
- but to my knowledge, such a command does not exist within GRUB). b. Delete the installed partition where we have installed our deployment
and applications if not matching. c. Encrypt the data partition with a key that only we can decrypt.
- We can run our entire installation from a DVD provided that is tied with
an online system which will not allow the system to boot unless the key matches with the one in our database.
This completely out of sync with FOSS spirit. In fact you should encourage other to copy/distribute your implementation freely.
You should really look at your value proposition and business model. What advantage are you offering to your customers which they can not get from clones?
Thanking you in anticipation of a reply. If your reply includes a commercial proposal, please inform us accordingly on my email id privately.
At least one company (cyberom) doing this and locking out even customers from their installation.
I would strongly suggest that you look at value proposition of your implementation over locking down customers. That will give you long term advantage over your competitors and they will become your partners!
Regards Kshitiz -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
With regards,