Hello all!

This post is more of a PSA regarding the latest version of the Veeam hardened repo community ISO provided by Rick Vanover on June 29th of 2023. If you’ve noticed weird network issues while setting up multiple repos on the same network using this ISO, this may help you.

While working on setting up two repositories on the same network, I ran into a weird network issue where only one repository seemed to be communicating at a time, noticed after running a ping to both at the same time and seeing only one was responding at any given time. After further troubleshooting, what I noticed is that both machines had generated the same software-defined MAC address for 802.3ad bonds. This MAC address is usually uniquely generated from the machine-id to avoid conflicts, but when digging deeper I noticed that both servers also had the same machine-id.

It seems that the machine-id may be baked into the ISO and as a result, any machines we installed using this ISO ended up generating the same MAC address and conflicting on the local network. Over 8 different installs, 6 physical and 2 virtual, it seems that each one had the same /etc/machine-id file. 

To get around this issue, I regenerated the machines’ id’s using the following commands, which successfully changed their IDs to be unique and gave them nonconflicting MAC addresses:

• rm -f /etc/machine-id
• dbus-uuidgen --ensure=/etc/machine-id

I used these commands on machines that had already been deployed from the ISO and added to Veeam Backup & Replication using a console and didn’t have any problems, but I would recommend doing this during the initial install process and before you add it to VBR to avoid any SSH key issues.

TLDR; if you’re having weird network issues with multiple repos on the same network using the June 29th 2023 Community ISO for Veeam’s Hardened Repository, you may want to ensure that the machine-id is unique on each of them, otherwise you could run into conflicting MAC addresses.

Hope this helps someone!