Debian: VM cleanup after cloning ################################ After you clone a virtual machine, it will still contain some garbage from the previous installation that we want to clean up. To do so, I usually run the following commands. These are not only debian-specific, although some modifications might be necessary for other distributions. Remove "persistent naming" udev rules ===================================== These are created to uiniquely associate device names, by serial number or so, and are responsible for things like your first vm network card being named ``eth1`` etc. So, just remove them:: rm /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-*.rules Clean up the bash history ========================= Usually, only the history for root will be "dirty" (although you can avoid writing it in the template by setting ``HISTFILE=`` in the terminal you use for administration tasks). To clean up the bash history for all the users in the system, you can use this:: cat /etc/passwd | cut -d: -f6 | sed 's@$@/.bash_history@' | xargs -d '\n' rm -fv Regenerate SSH keys =================== To rebuild the SSH keys of this machine, in order to avoid having the same key used amongst many machines:: rm -fv /etc/ssh/ssh_host_* dpkg-reconfigure openssh-server