You might have to tweak some things to make Linux clone nicely. Update this document as needed.
RHEL/Fedora does this by default. Ubuntu/Debian respects the /etc/hostname set at install time over DHCP. To fix this, just delete /etc/hostname.
Some Linux distributions try to keep track of which ethernet device is which by MAC address. This is bad for us, because when cloning, it will assume that eth0-1 were "removed" (since they aren't on the destination machine), and therefore use eth2-3. This screws things up, so we need to turn it off. The basic strategy is to remove MACs from existing config files and possibly turn off the feature that put them there in the first place.
Edit "/etc/udev/persistent-net-generator.rules" and add the following to the top:
# hack: turn ethernet persistance off GOTO="persistent_net_generator_end"
Next, edit "/etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules" (or similar) to remove MAC addresses already stored. Delete all uncommented lines. If you can't find this file, search all of /etc for files that contain your current MAC:
# ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr '''00:0C:29:F7:B9:9A''' inet addr:10.60.119.191 Bcast:10.60.119.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::20c:29ff:fef7:b99a/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:1523 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:295 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:110481 (107.8 KiB) TX bytes:40827 (39.8 KiB) Interrupt:177 Base address:0x1400 # grep -ri '''00:0C:29:F7:B9:9A''' /etc