Quote Originally Posted by rickbear View Post
What if one's application is installed on a virtual machine - you then clone the virtual machine and run two instances of the virtual machine on the same physical machine - each now allowing 1000 database entries = 2000 entries. Is there some way to distinguish the two virtual machines? I've tried to look at some of the wmi calls and the info looks similar on both virtual machines. But perhaps I haven't looked deep enough?
Well, it seems like a possible solution to this would be to generate some kind of key on the first run of the program, MD5 the datetime or something. Then just allow 1000 entries per key. So if they clone the machine it'll have the same key and the same entries. If they somehow put the key into a different machine then the fingerprint will be different, and if they run it on the same machine then who cares, because they only get 1000 entries anyway, and only one person can effectively use it at the same time...
It seems like a key/fingerprint combo could solve this problem.