My company get custom made motherboard from a vendor. Recently, we requested them to put UUID in our SMBIOS. They did it for us. According to them, they use a program to generate UUID Version 5 (SHA-1 hash). Details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier
When we received the motherboard and checked SMBIOS data, we do see a long strings of random characters. However, how to we verify that the strings are unique? When we asked them if there is a range or tool that we could just boards (just to check every few months to make sure that correct UUID is generated), they told us that they do not have any tools for us to check. As a result, right now our standard of QC is "as long as there is a string on UUID field in SMBIOS, we will PASS the board). However, I think we could not prevent if: - someone used the wrong program to generate wrong UUId string - someone executed the wrong step and have a batch of motherboard with the same string (not unique).
We also QC the MAC address on that board. For MAC address, at least there is a range assigned. So, we could at least check the range. But for UUID, there is no range.
I also check Dell's pc. I found out that 2 different of Dell models has UUID with same contents on the fist few (around 6-8) characters.
If possible, would you pls let me know how should I ask the motherboard engineers to provide a tool for us to check the strings once every few months.
I believe they could write a function to check, just like how a system verify encrypted (with salt) password stored in a database columns.
Thank you so much!