NT Gatekeeper: Using NewSID to Acquire Unique SIDs

We plan to use VMware's virtual machine (VM) software for a Windows NT 4.0 file-server consolidation project. In our testing lab, the SIDs of all the VMware-based servers were identical. (We used Sysinternals' PsGetSid tool to retrieve the machine SIDs and identical base VMware images to build the servers.) However, we were able to obtain unique SIDs by building a new VMware environment for every file server. Is a solution available that will give every file server a unique SID and that doesn't require a new VMware environment for every machine?

You can use a Sysinternals tool, NewSID (available for free from http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/newsid.shtml), to generate new computer SIDs. You can run the tool from the command line or from the Windows GUI. To run NewSID from the command line and to automatically reset a computer's SID, type

newsid /a

at the command prompt. In addition to generating new computer SIDs, NewSID replaces all occurrences of the old SIDs with the new SIDs in the registry, in the registry objects' ACLs, and in the file-system objects' ACLs.