About Appliance ID

During the initial Rockstor Setup and EULA stage of a Rockstor install, an Appliance ID is automatically generated. This ID, intended as a Universal Unique Identifier (UUID), is an exact copy of the host system’s, read motherboard’s, response to:

cat /sys/class/dmi/id/product_uuid

Note

With the majority of systems, this is a genuinely unique reference; and no intervention of any sort is required.

The implied uniqueness is assumed by multiple current Rockstor subsystems, e.g. when Adding a remote Rockstor appliance as part of setting up a Share Replication. And as part of configuring a system to use the Stable Channel updates.

Warning

WARNING: some systems, via lax firmware implementations, return a NON-Unique/fake product_uuid.

Fake Appliance ID examples

The following are examples on non-unique Appliance IDs, all recognised by the latest version of Rockstor.

  • 03000200-0400-0500-0006-000700080009 - ASRock N3700-ITX, ASRock C2550D4I - Rockstor devs. ASRock J3455 ITX - Thanks to forum member adworacz.

  • 00020003-0004-0005-0006-000700080009 - ZOTAC 880G-ITX (880GITX-A-E) - Thanks to forum member mmmdonuts.

  • 5c4606fa-192f-453a-b299-7b088c63bb9b - GIADA N70E-DR - Thanks to forum member hammerite.

  • 31393138-3538-5a43-3135-353130323750 - HP/HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 - Thanks to David via support email.

  • 00000000-0000-0000-0807-060504030201 - Reported by Appman

  • 00000000-2093bfe3-e53b-4fc3-9cb1-9217ea6228c7 - Reported by Appman

For all non-unique Appliance IDs known to the bundled version of Rockstor within an installer, a fail-over Appliance ID is substituted automatically. This has the advantage of ensuring that Rockstor’s Appliance ID dependant subsystems are functional. But the disadvantage is that upon re-install, using the same motherboard, a new Appliance ID will be generated.

Note

Appman a complementary service for Stable Updates subscription members, has the facility to trivially, and with immediate effect, transfer an active Stable Updates subscription activation code via an Appliance ID edit function. But far better that this is not required. Hence our initial use of hardware-static Appliance IDs.

Set Appliance ID

For whatever reason, mostly notably if you have a non-unique Appliance ID that is not known to Rockstor, the following procedure can assert an Appliance ID of your choice:

  1. Generate a genuinely unique UUID, e.g. from Online UUID Generator.

  2. Via a local console, as the root user, substitute your generated UUID in the following:

(i.e. replace your-generated-appliance-id-here with the Generated UUID).

psql -U rocky storageadmin
UPDATE storageadmin_appliance SET uuid='your-generated-appliance-id-here' WHERE current_appliance=True;
\q
exit

The above will expect entry of the password ‘rocky’. Our DB is configured, as per upstream defaults, To only be accessible via the local host: hence the local console requirement.

Confirm your new Appliance ID by visiting/refreshing the System -> Appliances Web-UI page.