chasetoys
21st May 2006 07:08 UTC

linking clients with servers on the fly!
folks:

i'm going to be distributing a client to users as they download it to their computer. I'd like to link the client to the server using a unique identifier that will already be stored in the database (i.e. the user has already signed and stored in the db when they go to download the application).

i have already used nsis to create a setup.exe that installs my application. i am compressing it as well using the best compression.

the servers will be linux and running sql or something...

i'd like the client to know what it's unique identifier is *when the user downloads the software*

my questions:
1) is there a way of including the # on the fly inside the compressed .exe file..? i.e. to have a placeholder inside the .exe that i could just textually replace on every download?
2) are there any other elegant ways of doing this? how would they work in lay man's terms? :P
3) i suppose i could run the nsis thing each time the user wants to download the client, and include this special # within the applciation directory, but i'd rather not...

help!

thanks!

Afrow UK
21st May 2006 10:53 UTC

One option would be to create a cookie and read somehow from the installer. Even though NSIS has a $COOKIES constant for the IE cookies folder, the user may well be using other web browsers.

Another option would be to temporarily store their IP address in the database. You'd need to have a server-side executable written in PHP or Perl (etc), which your installer would query with the InetLoad plugin passing the users' IP address to it.

-Stu