Tag Archives: VPS

This machine ID is already enabled with a different key or is non-unique

I have purchased new VPS and I wanted to enable Ubuntu live patch service for it. Unfortunately, the command canonical-livepatch enable [TOKEN] failed with this ugly error message:

This machine ID is already enabled with a different key or is non-unique.
Either “sudo canonical-livepatch disable” on the other machine, or regenerate a
unique /etc/machine-id on this machine with
“sudo rm /etc/machine-id /var/lib/dbus/machine-id && sudo systemd-machine-id-setup” :
{“error”: “Conflicting machine-id”}

I thought to myself “Ok, let’s try the suggested solution”. What I did was to backup the file /etc/machine-id, than delete it and run suggested systemd command. I was surprised to see the newly generated UUID was the same! Consulting with man page of systemd-machine-id-setup command revealed that “If run inside a KVM virtual machine and a UUID is configured (via the -uuid option), this UUID is used to initialize the machine ID. The caller must ensure that the UUID passed is sufficiently unique and is different for every booted instance of the VM.”. Obviously, my new VPS provider did not ensure that and somebody else has the same machine ID on his/her VPS and enabled Ubuntu live patch for it.

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