Patch Lady – what’s a GUID

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So the other day Microsoft indicated that they will be slightly changing the release notes – better known as knowledge base or KB’s as we often call t
[See the full post at: Patch Lady – what’s a GUID]

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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When is a GUID not a GUID or not all GUIDs are equal as I have learned the hard way so watch out!

Maybe not fully on topic but on the subject of GUIDs or something labelled as “unique” anything, in the past I have encountered two software publishers, Adobe (Flash a.k.a. “flush”) and Oracle (JRE client)  recycling GUIDs so different versions of the same app had at least two instances each which shared a GUID which should have been unique. I’m certain MS is capable of the same mess Adobe and Oracle are capable of creating.

Bottom line, it all sounds good on the surface but if some GUID is associated to a version of something don’t assume that it really is unique. And of course it is also said the Holy Roman Empire didn’t live up to its name either so beware! If it has happened before it will happen again.

• A happily retired chemist.

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anonymous wrote:

Maybe not fully on topic but on the subject of GUIDs or something labelled as “unique” anything, in the past I have encountered two software publishers,

Very much on topic.

Version 2 / DCE 1.1 UUID/GUID spec is a bit of a congested space for servers, what with a single “node” (usually single computer) being able to generate at most 64 unique IDs for the same purpose during a 429.49 second cycle. As in once per about 7 seconds. Any more than that will be either duplicates or noncompliant.

(That’s because the node/domain/identifier structure takes up a significant part of the space.)

And anything else… well there’s the timestamp field in some of the versions, which is of finite precision… and then there’s the fully random variant.

Uncoordinated random numbers, by definition, cannot be guaranteed to be unique.

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Some Collision Avoidance there.

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Yeah, that’s what the node/domain/identifier structure was supposed to be for… other servers doing the same thing, or same server for a different purpose.

It’s just… the UUID/GUID space isn’t big enough, partially because it’s partitioned to prevent crosswise collision.

I mean, really, the 128-bit UUID/GUID format is straight from the 1980s – as in from NCS, product of Apollo Computers (which later merged with HP … in 1989).

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It gets worse with each alleged improvement

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