Summary:
========
When you clone Vyatta system, your destination cloned machine
gets it ethernet interfaces "shifted".
For example, if you have nicely configured eth0 and eth1 on source system,
you will get unconfigured empty useless eth2 and eth3 on destination system,
while your eth0 and eth1 will be still present in config, but not available.

I know, it's not a bug, it's a feature, ethernet interface hw-id persists
in config.boot and when you clone system you get another couple of interfaces,
which will be indexed just after your old ethernet interfaces.

But imagine what means this feature for geeky  virtual lab owner,
who likes to clone virtual machines by pressing one simple button on his
hypervisor console and don't want to mess with hw-id every time he clones.
Since Vyatta claims itself as virtualization-friendly solution (and it is!),
IMHO not allowing simple one-click cloning is a major strategical miss,
even though not strictly a bug.


Proposed solution:
==================
Thanks to Vyatta clean and transparent structure, I was able to create
simple package(attached), which examines ethernet interface state on boot, 
detects cloned system, re-maps ethernet interfaces and reboots system (once).
After this one and only reboot system becomes sane and works as planned.
Package is wrapped around perl script based on XorpConfigParser
and it requires no configuration, just install and use:
http://www.vyatta4people.org/vyatta-clone-helper/
GitHub: https://github.com/vyatta4people/Vyatta-Clone-Helper
I propose to include this or something like this to official Vyatta release.
Please, don't hurt virtual lab owners, cause they really love Vyatta :)


Other thoughts:
===============
It may be nice to also implement automatic hostname generation for clones...