Phase 1 shipped without a plan around it, and the next two steps both touch a
different repository and the live boot image, so the reasoning needs to outlive
this week rather than being rediscovered from the code.
The finding that shapes the whole thing: cmmid.txt CANNOT simply be retired. It
is a PATH KEY, not just an identity - Verify-And-Heal-Staging stages
installers-post\cmm\backups\<cmmid>, 09-Setup-CMM locates the staged set by it,
and Restore-CMM restores from <BackupRoot>\<cmmid> as a same-bay operation. Only
one of its five consumers is an identity use. That one is also the one doing the
job badly, reporting a CMM's INSTRUMENT id in the machinenumber channel so the
server can resolve it back to a measuring tool at step 4 of its own fallback
chain.
So phase 2 has imaging write asset-id.txt ALONGSIDE cmmid.txt - two files, two
questions - and demotes the identity use while every path use stays exactly
where it is. cmmid.txt survives phase 3 too; it is not on any deletion list.
Phase 3 is the registry, HKLM:\SOFTWARE\GE\ShopDB\DeviceId. No new key and no
new read path: the collector already opens that key for BaseUrl and ApiToken and
Install-GEEnforce already writes it. The proposal argues for doing phase 3
BEFORE phase 2 rather than after, because then imaging writes the registry for
new bays and skips the file era entirely - the file survives only for bays
staged between phases, and the cleanup is deleting a branch instead of sweeping
a fleet.
Also recorded: the rail that must not be crossed (machinenumber is what
TargetMachineNumbers gates on, so a device id in that channel stops every
bay-gated entry from matching, silently, forever), what each phase does NOT
change, per-phase rollback, and a note that phase 1 stops new duplicates without
merging the ones a PC swap has already made - so the reconciliation backlog
should be read BEFORE imaging starts writing identities over the top of it.
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