I’ve been bitten by this a few times. I’ve been running Ubuntu slices recently on Slicehost. I generally follow the Pickled Onion setup Article

But when I clone a slice, the clone gets some fresh files: /etc/network/interfaces /etc/hosts

The “interfaces” file is the hook used to load up the iptables on boot, so that is particularly important.

I asked Slicehost support about this and they said that cloning basically sets up a new image. I though that was a pretty lame answer. If all my libraries in /usr and /opt are in there, I don’t consider it a “new image”.