James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
> If I have an installed system that I wish to duplicate and install on
> a dozen other machines. What Linux tools are there for this.
> The system to be copied is a Suse 9 and Suse 10 install using ext3
> partitions.
>
> I would like to do the install from either CD/DVD or Backup tape.
> Is there a tool that would create a CD boot install disk being a copy
> from an existing system?
Some ideas; for test, development equipment, critical servers and sometimes
workstations I use two methods over networks to clone boxes from master
images...
1) Partimage server and either PXE boot or a Linux CDROM distro.
http://www.partimage.org/ Once this is permanently built you will have a
robust and fast cloning and re-image facility.
2) Netcat for a quick to implement but less permanent solution, something like:-
Usually installed but if not ]#yum -y install nc (or equiv.)
*Slave* (Receiver) - the machine you want to re-image - IP 192.168.0.10.
]#nc -l -p 9000 | dd of=/dev/sd$ (replace /dev/sd$ with the drive on your
machine, i.e. sda)
*Master* (Sender) - machine containing the image you want to copy (can either
boot the master from a live disk or create an image in advance in which case
you would use dd if=image_file.img...)
]#dd if=/dev/sd$ | nc 192.168.0.10 9000
To speed up the process significantly don't dd complete disks, just
partitions and a MBR after creating them with fdisk separately instead.
Regards Damian
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