Below is a description of what happens when computers and VMs are cloned, when Splashtop streamer is already installed as part of the disk or VM image.
With the information below, hopefully you can formulate your own cloning workflow where Splashtop can still work properly.
Background
To work properly, Splashtop relies on each streamer instance to have a fully unique identifier.
The unique identifier is generated at the time of streamer installation.
If you clone a disk image that has streamer pre-installed, the two clones would have the same unique identifier. When multiple streamers have the same unique identifier, strange problems will happen, as described below.
Symptoms
- Only one of the cloned computers will show up in the computer list.
- Affected computers will have their streamers logged out consistently and removed from list.
- When you try to connect to that computer in the computer list, connection may be randomly to any of the cloned computers.
- If you restart the streamer on one of the cloned computer, it will appear in your computer list and take precedence over all the other clones.
Basically, streamers having the same unique identifier is not a usable setup and must be fixed!
Fixes
One workaround is to not include streamer in the disk image. Clone all the computers and VMs, then install streamer on each machine afterwards.
When streamer is installed, it creates a unique identifier relying on some system characteristics (e.g. MAC address), which are generally unique across computers and VMs.
If the Splashtop Streamer is already installed, you can try one of the below options:
- Uninstall and Reinstall Splashtop Streamer on the machine. Click here for info on uninstalling.
- Use the splashtop_uuid.htm file (attached in uuid_generate.zip) to force the streamer to generate a new unique identifier.
- Click here to reset the UUID on your current machine. Warning: This will put the computer back in Default Group and reset the streamer name back to the original computer name.
- For Linux users, please type this command in your terminal:
splashtop-streamer config -resetuuid -
For Mac/Windows users, if the link in Step 3 does not work, type this command into a web browser:
st-streamer://com.splashtop.streamer?resetuuid=1
Make sure to run this on all computers with this issue.
Support
If you'd like to learn more or need help in figuring out a suitable workflow, please contact our support team.