drupal - handle anonymous users

Question

i am working on a drupal project. The problem i have is, that a user should be only allowed to watch a special node 3 times per day. for registered users it's of course no problem, but how to handle guests/anonymous users?

A session or cookie is too unsecure, in my opinion... I couldn't find any drupal module to handle guests - is there a module? And if there is no module, what's the best way to implement that? I also thought about a server-side ip list, but i'm not really sure about this.

Answer 1

That's what session tracking and cookies are for...

If you MUST avoid using those, you could track a user server-side by creating a unique identifier from a concatenated combination of some of their environemnt variables. (e.g. 20120805-4.4.4.4-w7sp2-chrome-1920x1080-etc-etc...) Then, on the server side, you could track that as a user. It's not perfect and could still incorrectly exclude people who, from within the same IP use exactly the same client configuration.