Question

Ramifications of Duplicate Machine SIDs on an AD Domain running W2K3R2

Asked by: JamesDS

My current client has deployed about 900 Windows 2000 SP4 machines with the same SID - IE ghosted, but without running SYSPREP or NewSID afterwards.

These machines have been joined to an AD domain, which I am about to migrate (with ADMTv3) to a new AD domain as part of an infrastructure upgrade.

I can find lots of info on how to change SIDs, but nothing on the ramifications of duplicate machine SIDs on a Windows Server 2003 R2 Domain (W2K3 functional level). I've looked at the Domain SIDs and these are all unique due to the action of the RID on joining the domain - this is a problem related to the machine SID, assuming there is even a problem.

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Asked On
2007-07-17 at 07:14:50ID22701403
Tags

sid

,

duplicate

,

2003

,

machine

Topic

Windows 2003 Server

Participating Experts
1
Points
500
Comments
2

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Answers

 

by: tmassa99Posted on 2007-07-17 at 07:20:23ID: 19505080

Then all local administrator accounts on all computers with the same SID can easily be compromised.  It's not a huge deal, but since it's so easy to change, you should.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Utilities/NewSid.mspx
 Duplicate SIDs aren't an issue in a Domain-based environment since domain accounts have SID's based on the Domain SID. But, according to Microsoft Knowledge Base article Q162001, "Do Not Disk Duplicate Installed Versions of Windows NT", in a Workgroup environment security is based on local account SIDs. Thus, if two computers have users with the same SID, the Workgroup will not be able to distinguish between the users. All resources, including files and Registry keys, that one user has access to, the other will as well.

Another instance where duplicate SIDs can cause problems is where there is removable media formated with NTFS, and local account security attributes are applied to files and directories. If such a media is moved to a different computer that has the same SID, then local accounts that otherwise would not be able to access the files might be able to if their account IDs happened to match those in the security attributes. This is not be possible if computers have different SIDs.

-TM

 

by: JamesDSPosted on 2007-07-24 at 00:09:56ID: 19554005

tmassa99

Thanks for the response, this is pretty much all I was able to find out myself.
Cheers

JamesDS

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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