This is not the last of the problems we'll have with "the cloud", but I guess it's part of what makes it so exciting. :-) Many people, especially beginners, ma

This is not the last of the problems we'll have with "the cloud", but I guess it's part of what makes it so exciting. :-) Many people, especially beginners, make the mistake of leaving the same SSH keys in a certain template or in a snapshot of a virtual machine that they later use as a template. There are a few files that you really, really need to wipe out from a wannabe image template: - /etc/ssh/* key* (for reasons explained in the parent article. stupid autoformatting, remove the space after the first asterisk) - /var/lib/random-seed (the seed used to initialise the random number generator. this is the location on CentOS) - /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules (so that the VM's new NIC - with a new MAC - can use the same "eth0" name) People who want to do this more exhaustively can have a look at libguestfs and it's program virt-sysprep which does all of the above and more! http://libguestfs.org/virt-sysprep.1.html http://libguestfs.org/virt-sysprep.1.html