Cloning a FreeBSD system

[Adam Vande More]

On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 10:54 AM, Stephen Cook <sclists at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>    2a) I saw (on the internet) some people having problems because
> VirtualBox generates a new MAC address for cloned "machines", which somehow
> screws up the naming of the network interfaces (e.g. they get renumbered,
> thereby ignoring any configuration you have set up). Now I can't find it
> anymore, at least not for FreeBSD. Some Linux forums have info about
> "/etc/udev/rules.d/70-**persistent-net.rules" which doesn't exist in
> FreeBSD as far as I can tell. Is this a concern? I don't seem to be having
> a problem but TBH I'd rather understand what is going on than just be lucky.
>

You can set the MAC address statically in the VB machine.  I don't know if
it changes it by cloning a system, but even if it does you can change to
what you want even with the GUI tools.

FreeBSD doesn't use udev, and you should be thankful for it.  What a
nightmare when you want to do advanced things with your NIC's.  What I'm
guessing your reading about are people who have multiple nic's in the Vbox
guest, and upon cloning mac addresses are changed for the devices.  Since
Linux device detection doesn't enumerate things the same way each time they
created udev so devices would appear to have this.  Well as you've seen
evidence of, this doesn't work so well when tryin to script things on
unknown devices.  All this trouble to save a few seconds of boot time.


> 3) Create new SSH keys
>    3a) For host keys, I can delete the existing ones in /etc/ssh/ and
> reboot, is there a better way?
>

ssh-keygen(1) is the typical method.


-- 
Adam Vande More