How does one fix the multiple Forwarders with same GUID issue on Windows boxes?

[OldManEd]

Everyone,

Here is my situation. I set up one Windows box with a Universal Forwarder, V6.3. This one forwarder was to be the one that all the many other forwarders would be cloned from. An older version of a Forwarder was placed on these other Windows boxes when another group created a Windows image. This older version was never set up properly.

In an effort to clean things up, the process that was used to re-do the Forwarders was the following;

1. Stop the Forwarder service on the Windows box
2. Delete the “C:\Program Files\SplunkUniversalForwarder\” directory.
   
3. Copy in the new, updated, directory, “C:\Program Files\SplunkUniversalForwarder\”.
4. Restart the service

Everything looked OK but I'm using a separate server as a Deployment server and monitoring server. When I went to the Distributed Management Console under Forwarders>Instance I see the message below;

Note: Multiple forwarders installed on one host appear with identical host names, but different GUIDs.

When I went through all the devices listed, I only saw one entry for each hostname but I noticed that the GUIDs were all the same.

Does anyone know what's going on and how I can clean this up?

[OldManEd · Accepted solution]

To address this issue, delete the file below and then restart the Splunk Forwarder.

 “C:\Program Files\SplunkUniversalForwarder\etc\instance.cfg”  

[OldManEd]

After further review, I found that the issue is with the following file;

“C:\Program Files\SplunkUniversalForwarder\etc\instance.cfg”  

It contains the GUID entry. From what I read, I need to remove the "guid = " line and on the Forwarder restart, a new GUID should be generated.

My new question is, can I simply remove the entire file? The only thing in it is;

[general]
guid = <number>

[OldManEd]

After testing, it appears that deleting the "instance.cfg" file completely works fine. A new file is generated with a new GUID.