[fedora-virt] Cloned machine has no network

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 10:24:08PM +0000, Paul Jenner wrote:
> Hi John.
> 
> On Sun, 2010-01-17 at 19:28 -0800, John Poelstra wrote:
> > Thanks!  Yes, updating the MAC in 
> > /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 and 'rm 
> > /etc/udev/rules.d/*persistent-net*' plus a reboot made it work.
> > 
> > Would it be a viable RFE to suggest that the "cloning" operation would 
> > take care of this in the cloned guest automatically?
> 
> I think that is Fedora bug #524269 already. At least it looks like
> updates should live there.

I think virt-clone doesn't necessarily "know" what is in the guest
disk image that it is cloning.  All it does it to copy the image and
write a new, updated libvirt configuration (new UUID, new MAC address
and a few other things like that).

We noted in the bug that this is a good place for libguestfs /
virt-inspector / guestfish.

Unfortunately the problem of cloning a guest properly is rather
open-ended.  For example would you want to run sysprep or modify the
registry if you found out that it was a Windows guest?  How would you
clone a Debian guest that had a fixed IP address in
/etc/networking/interfaces?

With virt-inspector we go into the guest and find out all about its
configuration, what kernel and apps are installed, and lots of other
details.  At the moment we DON'T get the guest's network
configuration, but we could, and it would be worthwhile.  But
virt-inspector is a sort of "open proprietary standard" and for a long
time I've been looking to get cross-party agreement on what an XML
file format that fully described guest configuration would look like.
(For existing efforts and examples see:
http://git.annexia.org/?p=libguestfs.git;a=tree;f=inspector;hb=HEAD )

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines.  Tiny program with many
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