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How to change a cloned GNU/Linux machine's identity

You've just finished installing and configuring all those packages on your first machine. Now it's just a matter of cloning the hard drive into all the others and changing the hostname. Right?

Well, not so easy. If you wish to avoid conflicts on your network, backups and elsewhere, i.e. if you wanna end up with a unique fingerprint for each machine, you must go a few steps further.

Here follows a checklist to help you out. It's aimed at Debian and derivates (e.g. Ubuntu), though other distros won't be much different.

hostname

The old way: edit /etc/hostname and /etc/hosts

zambonin

#!/usr/bin/env awk -f
#
# AWK script to send multiple `sendkey` commands to a QEMU virtual machine.
# It writes at a rate of roughly 40 keys per second, due to lower delays
# resulting in garbage output.
#
# It makes use of a TCP client created by an external utility, such as OpenBSD
# Netcat, to interact with QEMU's monitor and send a stream of `sendkey`
# commands. This is a practical way to transfer a small file or to script
# interactions with a terminal user interface.

xkr47

# input: fullchain.pem and privkey.pem as generated by the "letsencrypt-auto" script when run with
# the "auth" aka "certonly" subcommand

# convert certificate chain + private key to the PKCS#12 file format
openssl pkcs12 -export -out keystore.pkcs12 -in fullchain.pem -inkey privkey.pem

# convert PKCS#12 file into Java keystore format
keytool -importkeystore -srckeystore keystore.pkcs12 -srcstoretype PKCS12 -destkeystore keystore.jks

# don't need the PKCS#12 file anymore