Deploying and Product Serial Number

[inaamrana]

Hello Everyone,
I am developing a standalone application in VB6. Regarding deployment features of application my client has following requirements.
1) Each CD that is shipped out should have a product ID associated with it.
2) A customer should only be able to install the software on his machine (or for that matter only one machine). Once installed the CD should become somehow unavailable for use by other machines. Since the software is to be shipped to few select customer therefore we can ask the customer to provide some information before we ship the CD to them.

My question is what Installation Software should I look for and who can provide me this functionality rather cheaply.

Thanks,

[Walter]

once a CD has been written to, the data on it cannot be changed, so making the CD usable only once is out of the question. it is possible to make the CD usable by only one computer though: i've heard of people getting the serial number of the hard drive. so if you can write a program to get the serial number of the hard drive of your clients you can hard-code this number into the program, and check it when your program starts

hope this gave you some ideas

[Dalceon]

one way to do it is to maybe hash some key based off of the computer name or Hardware Address.
Use that to generate the key.

Have them get the key directly from you instead of some predefined key.