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November 19, 2009 12:00 AM

Q. Is it true that I don't need to worry about duplicate machine SIDs anymore?

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A. For a long time, it's been been understood that duplicate SIDs is a bad thing, so any environment that uses machine imaging always performs an action to reset the SIDs, such as using SYSPREP from Microsoft.

Mark Russinovich recently posted an article that says there's no problem with duplicate machine SIDs, because when a machine joins a domain, the domain SID is used, and no one at Microsoft can come up with a reason a duplicate machine SID is a problem.

It is important to realize that just because Microsoft security still functions with duplicate SIDs, it doesn't mean every application will. Some applications, rightly or wrongly, still use the SID to identify a machine uniquely, so if you have duplicate SIDs in an environment, you may see things start to break. Application developers have long assumed the machine SID in an environment will always be unique, which was Microsoft's official guidance.

At this point, I would still err toward ensuring your machines' SIDs are unique until you have time to perform in depth testing to ensure that no applications or services in your environment rely on unique machine SIDs.

Related Reading:

Check out hundreds more useful Q&As like this in John Savill's FAQ for Windows. Also, watch instructional videos made by John at ITTV.net.

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Comments
  • Brian
    2 years ago
    May 20, 2010

    Hello, I read Marks article and think that everybody has gone over the edge with thinking duplicate SID's are not an issue? We are having major headaches with our WSUS server and our old SMS 2.0 software as well as Dameware because of what appears to be duplicate SID issues. For instance from what I have read about WSUS it pulls its WSUS id from the Machine SID. So when we looked into that we found that we have over 500 machines that have the same WSUS id and they are not functioning correct for reporting or installing updates. Is there anything official out there from Microsoft that says Duplicate SID's dont affect anything? Because I think their should be some clarification to point out Mark was only speaking from a security stand point and that SYSPREP still needs to be run on every pc in an NT enviornment. Please post any guidance you may have. Thanks

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