Groove 2007's 'same DeviceURL' problem

[Douglas Buchanan]

Context:
This involves one user using Groove 2007 to communicate files between two
virtual machines connected via VPN to different domains. These virtual
machines exist on the same hyper-v host.

The error received was:
Groove has detected another device with the same Device URL as yours.
The other device is running on your LAN with an IP address of xxx.xxx.x.xx
Please contact your administrator or Groove support immediately.

What I understand about this issue:
One mistake was to clone the virual machine without a sysprep.
Another mistake may have been (I am not sure) that MS Office (and Groove)
was not also reinstalled.

To correct this I did the following:
On the daughter clone machine I ran sysprep so that it would create its own
SID so that it would no longer be a clone.

I uninstalled Office and Groove just to make sure any unique identifiers in
Groove or Office were gone - if there is such a thing. I then reinstaleld
Office and Groove.

I copied over the account .grv file, intiated the account on that machine
and... No success!
I get the same error:
Groove has detected another device with the same Device URL as yours.
The other device is running on your LAN with an IP address of xxx.xxx.x.xx
Please contact your administrator or Groove support immediately.

By the way, there are two other virtual machines within this hyper-v that
successfully and without incident synchronize on this same account. They are
different operating systems.

Why does this happen? What can I do to remedy this?

 

[Gregg Johnston [MSFT]]

Hi there,

You can clone or duplicate computers that have Groove installed, but there
is one big caveat to doing this – you cannot have already started Groove on
the original computer.

The reason for this is because as soon as you start up Groove on a computer,
whether you create an account or not, a device account is created along with
a device URL. If you copy or clone the machine, then you are duplicating
this device account and device URL that needs to be unique to the original
computer – and thus the error “Same Device URLâ€.

You can fix this issue by running a grooveclean –all on the computer that is
getting the error:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/907854 and then reimport the account file
back over to the VM.

As an aside, sysprep probably would not have prevented this issue, but if
you have a clean machine copy that you are using for your VM’s, run a
grooveclean –all on that image and then you can safely distribute that image
to other VM’s.

Gregg

 

[Douglas Buchanan]

Thank you. That was just what I needed!

Hi there,

You can clone or duplicate computers that have Groove installed, but there
is one big caveat to doing this – you cannot have already started Groove
on
the original computer.

The reason for this is because as soon as you start up Groove on a
computer,
whether you create an account or not, a device account is created along
with
a device URL. If you copy or clone the machine, then you are duplicating
this device account and device URL that needs to be unique to the original
computer – and thus the error “Same Device URLâ€.

You can fix this issue by running a grooveclean –all on the computer that
is
getting the error:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/907854 and then reimport the account file
back over to the VM.

As an aside, sysprep probably would not have prevented this issue, but if
you have a clean machine copy that you are using for your VM’s, run a
grooveclean –all on that image and then you can safely distribute that
image
to other VM’s.

Gregg