Hi,
A couple months ago, I migrated our local school (two servers, 20 desktop clients) from Slackware 14.1 to CentOS 7. The desktop clients are running a customized lightweight desktop based on Xfce:
https://blog.microlinux.fr/poste-de-travail-xfce-centos-7/
Home directories are all on the server, and authentication is centralized. Everything works fine so far.
With Slackware I had found a neat trick to install the desktop clients. First I installed and configured one single client PC from start to finish. The I zeroed all the unused sectors on the disk, using something like this:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/0bits bs=20M ; rm -f /0bits
Then I sent the disk image to a local FTP server using G4L (Ghost4Linux).
On all the other desktops PCs, I could then "import" the G4L image, and the system was ready to use.
Under Slackware, the only thing I had to make sure was to remove the one bit of hardcoded system information before uploading the image:
# rm /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
Now I tried to do this with CentOS, but I failed miserably. The system wouldn't even start, since GRUB uses UUIDs and not /dev/sdX like Slackware's bone-headed LILO boot manager.
So here's my question to the guru admins on this list. On a standard CentOS desktop, what would I have to tweak in order to be able to clone my system bit for bit, as is ?
Cheers,
Niki