Potential Issues You Might Encounter

A handful of applications might need a few tweaks to function smoothly with DaDesktop

Challenges with Fresh Start Cloning and How to Address Them

The majority of apps run perfectly after being set up on a Fresh Start machine in DaDesktop (DD). However, a couple of applications don't behave as expected after cloning, and a few additional steps are required to get them working properly.

• Oracle Database Server — The hostname needs to be changed from the duplicate to 127.0.0.1
• Hyper-V server — Hyper-V can run into duplicate MAC address issues when the External switch is enabled, after cloning from the FreshStart machine
• Google Chrome — Chrome might not launch properly on cloned machines because of a profile linked to the Fresh Start machine, especially if the Fresh Start machine wasn't fully shut down before cloning
• WSL - Windows System for Linux — In our testing, DaDesktop machines that include a WSL installation turn out not to be portable. That is, if you move a DaDesktop machine with WSL to a different DD server, it won't boot properly. The exact reason is unclear, but we suspect Windows makes assumptions about the hardware it was set up on, and moving to another server causes a conflict. Since WSL is seldom used in training (Linux is usually run directly), this issue hasn't been fully looked into yet
• Issues where a trial software licence uses the MAC address to track the licence — This covers situations where a trial software licence relies on the MAC address to track activation. In the instance described, the licence was linked to a MAC address, so after cloning, it appeared as though the licence had already been activated and used.
• Applications that need a licence may have to be set up after the FreshStart machine is cloned.
   

Other Problems That Might Come Up While Working with DaDesktop

• Severely sluggish VirtualBox when Hyper-V and VirtualBox are both in use (This can happen regardless of DaDesktop)

  Problem: VirtualBox running painfully slow on Windows machines, to the point where delivering a course becomes nearly impossible. Yet the fix is quite simple:
  Solution 1: Uninstall Hyper-V virtualization from Windows:

  https://www.wintips.org/fix-virtualbox-running-very-slow-in-windows-10-11/

  Solution 2: Apply the Hyper-V Server workaround described earlier; otherwise, duplicate MAC addresses will be used, causing slow performance, boot issues, and other odd behaviour.

• Can't type certain characters, for instance Apostrophes / Quotation Marks, Inverted Commas, into a DaDesktop machine.