On Tue, Nov 08, 2016 at 03:31:51PM -0500, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
Given the size of those numbers, I think FEDORA-XXXXXXXX is probably entirely reasonable.
Agreed. "FED-" is too ambiguous. "FEDORA-", or even better "Fedora-" is much nicer.
The obvious answer could be to use FED-XXXXXXXXXXX which would be the same as Windows. Or we could opt to sacrifice three characters worth of entropy in exchange for using the whole word: FEDORA-XXXXXXXX. In the first case, we would have a 1 in 1.3x10^17 chance of colliding (assuming perfect random number generation). In the second case, it would be 1 in ~2.2x10^12.
We can also use (non-repeating) "-" in the random part, which gives 1 in ~2.8x10^12. Fedora does not have that many installations, and note that this only has to be unique within installation, so I think the odds are pretty good.
Zbyszek