We have a limited, small, number of IEEE 802.3 connected hardware 
platform identical workstations to clone -- no 802.11 nor any shared 
(remote, distributed) disk storage (at this time).  My plan was to get 
one fully operational and configured, and then clone the hard drive 
image onto the remaining machines one hard drive at a time.

Let A represent the operational (clone source) machine, and Bhd a target 
hard drive.  The hard drive on A is /dev/sda, call it Ahd.  A is shut 
down power off.  Bhd is installed into an available bay on A, A is 
booted, and Bhd appears as /dev/sdb in A.  Using dd on A, clone /dev/sda 
to /dev/sdb .  Mount on A the partition of /dev/sdb that contains /etc 
(there are no end user home directories -- only home directories are 
those of the system administration users).  Using a text editor (e.g., 
vi), modify the /etc/sysconfig/net* scripts/directories, as well as 
/etc/hosts. for the name and IP address of machine B that will contain 
Bhd (resolv.conf will be the same -- all of these machines are in the 
same DNS subzone, same TCP/IP subnet).  Iterate through all of the 
target workstation hard drives.  As there are no other distributed 
services running, this should suffice.

Shutdown A, remove Bhd, install Bhd into B, boot B upon which Bhd should 
appear as /dev/sda .  Done.

Is there a better method in terms of software?  At this time, I do not 
want to setup a remote image server that effectively will download the 
full image of Ahd onto Bhd over a network, nor do I want to make a 
custom install DVD as we only have a small number of workstations to 
clone, not, say, one hundred.

I do understand that if Ahd and Bhd present different bad blocks to the 
OS, and these are not "hidden" by the intelligence on each individual 
hard drive, then dd may not work.  However, the drives already have been 
surveyed and the bad block situation should not be an issue.

A related question (that was partially addressed in a different thread): 
  is there a way to remove/disable Network Manager and use a traditional 
static configuration?  On a laptop that needs to move within the field 
from one 802.11 network to another, with a different DNS zone and TCP/IP 
configuration, Network Manager provides similar ease and functionality 
to the end user autoconfiguration applications that are used under Mac 
OS X or modern MS Win.  This is unnecessary and in some sense dangerous 
for static workstations that need no such dynamic configuration.

My thought was to find the RPM that installs Network Manager and simply 
uninstall it, either via yum or a simple rpm -e command.  Is Network 
Manager too deeply ingrained in current EL6 (using TUV compliant model) 
to make this feasible?

Yasha Karant