This module collects all IP and MAC addresses from several available sources on the underlying system. See the module documentation for more details, supported Python releases and platforms.

The uuid timestamp is 60 bits, the number of 100 nanosecond increments since Oct. 15, 1582 This simple function returns a value which makes datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp() happy.

It simply rewinds the code in the standard library's uuid1 function:

nanoseconds = int(time() * 1e9)
# 0x01b21dd213814000 is the number of 100-ns intervals between the
# UUID epoch 1582-10-15 00:00:00 and the Unix epoch 1970-01-01 00:00:00.
timestamp = int(nanoseconds/100) + 0x01b21dd213814000

This is a short & sweet UUID function. Uniqueness is based on network address, time, and random.

Another good point: does not create a "hot spot" when used in a b-tree (database) index. In other words, if your IDs look something like "abc100" and "abc101" and "abc102"; then they will all hit the same spot of a b-tree index, and cause the index to require frequent reorganization. On the other hand, if your IDs look more like "d29fa" and "67b2c" and "e5d36" (nothing alike); then they will spread out over the index, and your index will require infrequent reorganization.