QUESTION :
I have two Asus all-in-one desktops running Windows XP Pro SP3.
I set one up perfectly for my needs, so I decided to use Clonezilla to clone it’s HDD to the other one.
Everything went well, but now when I log into a site (such as Gmail) on one and refresh the page for that service on the other, the other is logged in with the credentials I used on the first computer. Logging out on one logs out on both.
They both have different IP addresses but are behind the same router and I’ve changed their hostnames since cloning them.
Why could this be happening?
Update – After some testing, changing the SID had no effect, clearing cookies had no effect, yet restoring IE8 to default settings (including user settings) has resolved the issue temporarily (For three days)
What is causing this?
ANSWER :
I don’t think it could be related to SSID as your browser won’t pass it to a remote server.
I think you didn’t clear your cookies after you cloned your hard drive which caused Google to use the same session ID for the two machines.
The HTTP protocol provides no method to identify a machine apart from setting cookies, so most websites store a “session cookie” with a unique ID to identify you. Your log-in state is normally stored on their server and associated to that ID, so they don’t have to send you new cookies each time you do something.
It is very possibly related to your SSID. The SSID is the real identifier of the computer to other computers. Right now they are still the same computer in a technical sense to other computers.
You should change it on the new computer using this tool from Sysinternals (purchased by Microsoft).
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897418 (also read the section: “The SID Duplication Problem”)
You can now get it here:
http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/NewSID-Download-41001.html