I have a production server running Ubuntu. I would like to setup similar configuration installed on my local machine. I'd like to have same packages installed.
Since bandwidth is a constraint the traditional disk cloning methods won't work for me. Having same packages installed and same users with same passwords created would be wonderful; I'll tweak the rest of the things manually.
Is there a good solution for my requirements?
dpkg --get-selections > packlist.txt
cat packlist.txt | dpkg --set-selections
dselect install
For details on this command, check here on joys of programming
If you need the same users and passwords you should grab /etc/group /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow
If you need the user data you need to copy /home (it's usually HUGE, so it was left out of the original post)
Install aptoncd.
sudo apt-get install aptoncd
aptoncd
Select the packages, create iso, take to other machine, install aptoncd, and then restore from iso.
You can use remastersys 
for that. Remastersys can make a full system backup including personal data to a live CD or DVD that you can use anywhere and install.
For reference see the posts below:
I haven't tried clonezilla myself, and I hardly know how it works, but what I've been told so far is that you should be able to make an exact copy of your system, and I guess you should be able to install the copy as well.
you can read about Clonezilla here
