Re: Installing five identical systems...

[Michal Jaegermann <michal ellpspace math ualberta ca>]

Jen-Shiang Yu wrote:
> 
> Now I have done setup on one machine, and 
> am wondering if there is any tool that can just "duplicate" the existing
> partition/data on the current system disk to the rest four new disks so as 
> to prevent from re-installation "from scratch".

If you are willing to mount a new disk on an existing machine runnig
Linux then "the tool" is called 'cp'.  GNU cp "knows" how to handle
special devices, pipes and the like.  The simplest is 'cp -a' but you
probably want to use 'cp -dpRx' as you do NOT want to copy things like a
contents of /proc or /dev/pts.  This approach will also prevent attempts
of recursive copies of itself on itself. :-) Check 'man cp' for detailed
explanations.

You may use for the same purpose other tools, like 'cpio' or 'tar'
(writing on stdout and piping its output to another tar which extracts
stdio; a similar trick with 'dump'/'restore' pair) but 'cp' is likely
the simplest.

> 	I believe such tools exist, or how can those system vendors bear
> doing the same job for one hundred times to install the 128-node cluster?

A simple script may partition the whole disk (using 'sfdisk' or
'minlabel' - depending on a type of partitioning you require), format
newly created partitions, mkswap, and copy required contents to fresh
media.  With a bit of creativity and a network you can boot into a
ramdisk, aquire IP number by dhcp (say), run a script which will prepare
a new disk and 'rsync' its contents over a network from a "master node".
Everything you need is there.  This is another OS which goes under a
name of "No Tools". :-)

  Michal