I have several machines which I want to be exactly identical. It is the first time I am trying to clone machines and I searched on the internet and found many people archive and extract their disks using some tools, using dd, and I also found someone using tar. I read about different tools. I tried g4u, a tool for hard disk image cloning, but it didn't boot. Now, I am more familiar with tar and I created an archive of the whole file system of one machine using tar (tar -czvlps −−same−owner −−atime−preserv -f machine.tgz /) and I extracted this tar on other machines (tar -xslpzf machine.tgz). I did this with machines booted on CDs, mounting the drives and copying over network.

When I reboot I see the new machines with hostname as expected, I try login with the old password combinations, however I get "permission denied" and I am thrown back to login. When I try ssh to a new machine I get "unable to get valid context." Permissions and files should be exactly the same on the new machine (and look as if they were, although I didn't do any extensive comparisons).

Now before I try other stuff or go into long search of the problem, I am suspecting that I miss something and I want to ask people who have done this before. Am I making some stupid mistake? I suppose that tar and dd are more or less doing the same thing, or is there any forcing argument for using dd instead. Any help appreciated.