How do I network a Linux machine with a Windows NT machine?

Two machines with identical names are generally not allowed on the same network, and, for Windows NT and its successors, two machines with identical security IDs (SIDs) are not allowed on the same Active Directory domain. A disk cloning program must change these as part of copying the disk or restoring the image. Some operating systems are also (by design) not well suited to changes in hardware, so that a clone of Windows XP for example may object to being booted on a machine with a different motherboard, graphics card and network card, especially if non-generic drivers are used. Microsoft's solution to this is Sysprep, a utility which runs hardware detection scans and sets the SID and computer name freshly when the machine boots. Microsoft recommends that Sysprep be set up on all machines before cloning, rather than allow third party programs to configure them. By contrast, Linux systems simply require the necessary kernel modules to be available (or compiled directly into the kernel), which will automatically load on the new hardware.