NewSid
Tuesday 17th October, 2006 09:28 Comments: 2
I've been creating a small network based on a few clones of a VMWare host with an installed and activated copy of Windows 2003 SP1 (MSDN licences allow up to 10 activations). I've heard people mention problems with using cloned images/virtual machines, but never came across it myself as up until now I've only used them as standalone hosts, but it's clearly an issue with a domain (they can join the domain okay, giving the illusion that all is well, but that's about it). Well it seems the nice SysInternals guys (the ones behind ProcessExplorer, RegMon, FileMon etc.) have created NewSid.
It's fine for private or commerical use, but you're not allowed to use the source code in a commercial or freeware SID-changing product. I've tried it on two copies of 2003 SP1, and it appears to work fine (although when the admin logs in for the first time you get an unexpected restart error, that appears to be safe to ignore but don't be surprised when you see it). It turns out that Joe already knew about it, but I don't know if anyone else in the office had come across it. Altiris and Symantec have similar programs to help with deployment of images, but you have to pay for them.
But this tool is tiny, it only takes a few clicks to work, and you can either let it choose a random SID or even specify one.
Oh, and I've found How to install the Microsoft Loopback adapter in Windows XP, useful if you want to get VMWare up and running (e.g. for a demo) but don't have a network connection.
It's fine for private or commerical use, but you're not allowed to use the source code in a commercial or freeware SID-changing product. I've tried it on two copies of 2003 SP1, and it appears to work fine (although when the admin logs in for the first time you get an unexpected restart error, that appears to be safe to ignore but don't be surprised when you see it). It turns out that Joe already knew about it, but I don't know if anyone else in the office had come across it. Altiris and Symantec have similar programs to help with deployment of images, but you have to pay for them.
But this tool is tiny, it only takes a few clicks to work, and you can either let it choose a random SID or even specify one.
Oh, and I've found How to install the Microsoft Loopback adapter in Windows XP, useful if you want to get VMWare up and running (e.g. for a demo) but don't have a network connection.
Yamahito - Tuesday 17th October, 2006 09:40 I find it a bit strange that the SysInternals guys didn't mention sysprep in their article at all...
Having said that, NewSid looks like a lot less hassle.
Having said that, NewSid looks like a lot less hassle.
I've not used it myself, but I believe Sysprep assigns the SID the first time the computer is restarted (and prompts the end user for required and user-specific information). Sysprep is also meant to remove hosts from the domain (NewSid didn't seem to think it was a problem and left the hosts in my domain). The versions of Sysprep also seem to be OS specific, so you can't use the XP one on 2000 etc. (NewSid apparently works across multiple OS). Plus it all seems like overkill just to do a tiny change of SID. But you're right, it seems odd they didn't mention Sysprep at all.