Generating a serial unique ID is sometimes more suitable for human. I would like to suggest doing like this: make a zope product which can be called with a url and return the unique id. It will serialize all the request and make sure the serial number it issued is unique. This method will allow issuing serial id across the network. By modify it to check for duplicate after the generation of a random id, it can issue random serial id also. If we can make it listern on a different port than the web server, and provide a simple protocol to ensure the client receive the id, then it can work as a id server on the network. Rgs, Kent Sin