Possible Ramifications of Cloned Disk/Partition UUIDs?

[monsoon]

Hello!

As of recently, I’m implementing FOG in our organization and overall it’s going really smooth! Every hurdle I’ve been able to find an answer, either here in the forums, wiki or the docs.

During testing, in deployment I noticed the UUID for the disk and all the partitions were being cloned from the image. I understand that this is by design of FOG and possibly most other disk cloning software, however are there any possible ramifications of having identical disk UUIDs on numerous machines?

We are an MSP, imaging for different companies and currently only dealing with Windows 10/11. Each deployment does have a unique system UUID and I’m only referring to the disk and partitions.
Our soon-to-be-replaced imaging solution does not clone these so each deployment have unique UUIDs, which is what got me wondering on the purpose/requirement of this (at least for a Windows system).

From what I was able to test I’m not finding any issues with this but figured I’d reach out before putting FOG into production.

Thank you for your time and any input you may have!

[george1421]

@monsoon Let me preface this with this is a logical guess.

The uuids are not changed by design. This is because the FOS Engine (linux based) can not step into the windows environment to update the disk uuids in the registry. Why your current system does do the uuid remapping is probably its a windows based imaging tool. On the linux side the disks are typically mounted by using their uuids and not the partition location. Both methods can be used but most distros use the uuids in case the disks get moved around within the chassis, the OS will be able to find the disk. I would assume the same on the windows side.

So lets think about what problems would it cause if you had 2 disks with the same partitions and disk uuid. IMO it wouldn’t cause a problem unless 2 cloned disks were installed in the same computer. Unless this conditioned happened I don’t see it as a problem. Potentially if you had external tools that inventoried these computers it might have a problem, but again that disk uuid should be connected to a sid and not stand alone.

[Sebastian Roth]

@monsoon I guess what you refer to is done within the FOS engine scripts: https://github.com/FOGProject/fos/blob/master/Buildroot/board/FOG/FOS/rootfs_overlay/usr/share/fog/lib/partition-funcs.sh#L25

Most probably this was added because various Linux systems use partition/filesystem UUIDs in bootloader configuration. Though I am not sure.

No idea if this can cause any harm in your situation.

[monsoon]

@george1421 Thank you for your explanation! This makes sense and I was thinking of that same scenario with having more then one of same cloned disk in the same system. I tested most of our external applications and found no issues including ones that record or reference the UUID of the disk in some way and found no conflicts. As you said, the disk is attached to the “parent” record.

@Sebastian-Roth Thanks for the code reference, this does appear to be the function performing what I am referring to and I appreciate your honesty

Thank you again to both of you on your input! Tremendously appreciated.
I’ve found this to be a great community and hopefully I’ll be able to be give back in one way or another