Re: Installing five identical systems...

[Rich Payne <rdp talisman alphalinux org>]

cp isn't always a good way to do it, especially from a currently mounted
filesystem. The best I've found is:

Create your system, setup how you want all of them to look
Put that disk into a machine, along with your blank, and boot from a
third. 

So the machine has 3 disks, the original, the blank, and the disk you're
running from.

then you can do a dd, example

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

now this will work perfectly if the disks are the same size, if they are
different sizes then things get a little tricky! You can also do this to a
file, then dd the file out to disks again. The other things with the file
is that you can mount it via the loop driver and delete things like /proc
that you don't want copied!

It's not good just to copy or dd from the disk the system is running on,
remember that as you copy, files are going to change on the disk (logs
etc....) not good! 

--rdp

 On Fri, 10 Dec 1999, Helge Kreutzmann wrote:

> Hallo !
> On Fri, 10 Dec 1999, Jen-Shiang Yu wrote:
> >	I am about to install RedHat Linux together with Digital Unix
> >on five identical DP264 machines. 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". This way I can just plug the
> >copied system disk into another machine, boot from it and change the 
> >configurations since the hardware setting on these five machines are all the
> >same. 
> 
> If those disks are SCSI, you should be able to just hook all disks
> parallel in the already installed system and
> cp -a / /mnt/newdisk1
> (then newdisk2 etc.). I don't know if you can clone aboot that way. And
> you may want to double check the cp-Options.
> 
> Once finished you put each HD back into its box.
> 
>             Helge
> 
> 
> -- 
>                Helge.Kreutzmann@stud.uni-hannover.de
>                      kreutzm@itp.uni-hannover.de
> 
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Rich Payne
rpayne@alphalinux.org			www.alphalinux.org