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SID- Whats the deal?

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by shs_bulldog

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Got a NT network with 8 servers at different sites, with about 800 clients at each site. Well I keep getting promblems about losing SID. I have cahnged the sid and synchronized it with a program called NEWSID, which works most of the time, but it crashed 2 of my servers also. Question, at one of my sites, all the clients are trying to connect to one of my servers, and about every 2 or 3 seconds, I get an error in the event log that says I need to restablish the sid. I have removed it and readded it to the domain, but that didnt work. What can I do?????????????????????

7 replies

by it's not easy being green

I am not sure but, there is an issue with NT Domains losing the trust relationships. There is a patch for it but, is considered unsupported (it's still Beta) by MS. It worked like a charm on my network.

by donq

SID is a computer concatenated identifyer concatenating a User Name and the User ID together. These values are stored for a Workgroup in a file that has a ".mdw" extension. Microsoft defaults this file to "System.mdw" and I found mine stored underWinnt|System32. System.mdb contains ALL Workgroup security data and MUST be accessed for reference by the application every time someone logs on. You may have a problem accessing the ".mdw" file to validate SIDs???

by tomsal

The other guy who posted earlier is wrong. The SID has NOTHING...say again NOTHING to do with the USER Name. He is most likely confusing a SOFTWARE based (re: MS Access) SID to a system SID (which is the "default" SID people think you are talking about when you say SID).

In NT land the SID, Security IDentifier, is a unique string of characters (I believe its all in hex) that identifies, uniquely, the domain controller, server, computer, workstation - which ever the case may be for a certainmachine. SIDs come in to play when you set up Trust Relationships, shares, schronizations, replications, etc.

I never heard of a program that alters the SID - I'd avoid it like the plague, IMHO I think its foolish to manually create/alter you own SIDs. The value is stored in the registry. If your SIDs got corrupted or somehow you duplicated them (though this is impossible normally, but since you were messing with them using a program I can see where this can happen). Under normal SOP for Winnt administration the only way (they only healthy way) to change or Restore a SID is by re-installing.

Good luck. :)

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