Colleague cloned a provisioned SD Card

Product support balenaOS
1

Wasn’t sure if this is a BalenaCloud or BalenaOS issue.

I gave my colleague some prototypes with a SD card that was successfully communicating with BalenaCloud (using a production OS)

We are making more prototypes so we needed another SD card made, he ended up cloning the original SD card… (He hasn’t read up on Balena yet) thinking he could install it in the new prototype and it would work fine.

I feel like this is a big no no, but i can’t quite say why.

I figured I’d ask the community to see what the consequences of doing this are. I’d expect some synchronization problems might occur… especially if both SD Cards are online.

What happens if one of our customers does this? How could we detect the issue?

4

Hi,

So the SD card contains the UUID and corresponding key that the device uses to talk to our API. If you cloned the card then you’ll have 2 devices trying to talk to our API with the same info and it will just look like 1 device. While it might work, I imagine managing them will be next to impossible as the records for the device will be switching to vaues for each one and you’ll never know which device it really is in reference to.