Re: [PLUG] New Linux Machines and cloning?

[John Von Essen <john@essenz.com>]

I am not too familiar with LVM mirroring, but if that is what you are
doing. You can do all the installs on drive 1, then later on, create the
mirror over to drive 2.

So on machine 1, do the full install on drive 1. Then attached a blank
drive, boot with a cd, and use dd to copy over the entire disk. This will
grab everything, mbr, lilo, etc.,. Put that blank drive in machine 2, and
so on. So you'll have 6 machines with an identical booting drive 1. Then
add blank drives 2's to all those machines, and setup the LVM mirror.

Its a bit more complicated with hardware RAID.

I have done this many times in the past when cloning single drive
machines. However, there are some methods that do this same end result
with more prep time, but are more scalable long-term. The dd stuff
requires identical drives, lots of physical labor, etc.,.

It would be better to create a "build" config and use fai or kickstart,
etc.,.. This way you can push out the install to an infinite number of
machines, regardless of drive type or raid config.

-John


On Thu, 1 Dec 2005, Alexander Birch wrote:

> On 12/1/05, Daniel.G.Roberts@sanofi-aventis.com <
> Daniel.G.Roberts@sanofi-aventis.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hello All
> >
> > I have six new linux machines which I must deploy ASAP of course!
>
>
>
> What Distribution of Linux? If it's debian, I would recommend:
> http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/
>
> This will help with reimaging computers in the future, you just have to put
> in a floppy.
>
> Alex
>
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