Machine SID Duplication

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bjorn

192 posts

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#110556 11-Oct-2012 16:18

Ever since I've been in IT I've had it drummed into me that you always need to Sysprep when cloning PCs. I've always done this and never really questioned it until today.. When I noticed that I had forgot to sysprep a lot of PCs I had cloned and deployed with out any issue.

Doing some research on the matter I came across this article here: http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2009/11/03/3291024.aspx

What are your thoughts on the matter? It makes an interesting read, comments and all.

wasabi2k

2102 posts

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#699800 11-Oct-2012 16:31

I have always felt that the whole not running sysprep was inherently wrong, even since reading that article (which is well researched and categorical in saying you don't need to).

I spent many years sysprepping ghost images and PCs so it's burnt in deep.

Given 99% of my deployments these days are VM templates which get sysprepped anyway I don't have much constructive feedback - other than I have never had an issue with duplicate SIDs on XP or newer.

ubergeeknz

3344 posts

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Vocus

#699803 11-Oct-2012 16:33

I know back when I was in IT support, there were issues affecting WSUS and SMS if you didn't sysprep/sidwalk. As evidenced also by

Note that Sysprep resets other machine-specific state that, if duplicated, can cause problems for certain applications like Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), so MIcrosoft's support policy will still require cloned systems to be made unique with Sysprep.

raytaylor

4076 posts

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#703777 19-Oct-2012 21:20

Was sysprep required for windows 2000?
I remember being asked to install windows 2000, office 2000 and IE on a bunch of pc's with less than a gigabyte of hard drive space and i never sysprepped them before i cloned them.

Ray Taylor

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