Generate a new device ID in ZeroTier

ZeroTier is a great service to connect your VMs, mobile devices, and computers no matter if in cloud, behind a NAT, or on your local home or office network. Without going too much in detail, the client software creates virtual interfaces and lets you join multiple networks (on supported devices) acting like chat rooms for machines, as they say on their website. You can create and manage networks via your account on my.zerotier.com and even deploy your own relay servers (moons). ZeroTier uses peer-to-peer connections when it is possible for max throughput and minimal latency. Among the other benefits, it is open-source, with clients available for almost every platform, and its connections are end-to-end encrypted.

While it resembles a VPN at first glance, under the hood, each virtual network is much more like a virtual switch your devices are connected to. And each device is recognized on the underlying infrastructure by an ID, which is generated the first time your run zerotier-cli or one of the client apps.

Resetting the device ID

It may happen you want to regenerate the ID automatically given to your device. I had to spawn a couple of instances out of the same VM snapshot, so I needed a different ID on each of them.

So here it is. Be sure /usr/sbin is in PATH as zerotier-cli is installed there.

rm /var/lib/zerotier-one/identity.public
rm /var/lib/zerotier-one/identity.secret
systemctl stop zerotier-one.service
systemctl start zerotier-one.service
zerotier-cli join YOURNETWORKID

I hope it helps. Thanks for reading.