RE: Installing five identical systems...

["Greg Lindahl" <glindahl hpti com>]

> Using fsk to check the validity of the target isn't a reliable check
> because the copy is done below the filesystem level.

The second clause of this sentence is true, but the first clause doesn't go
with it. Since all the files you care about aren't changing, this technique
does work, and I've used it about 1000 times with no failures. If you are
really worried, boot into single user mode, remount the source partition
read only, and then make the copy. But it's a waste of your time.

> If you create a minimal system which allows you to boot from a diskette
> and connect to a network, you can perform this type of disk duplication
> over your LAN (dd if=/dev/sda | rsh somehost 'dd of=/dev/sda').

This is impossible on an alpha, because the binaries are too big. Intead I
wrote a program which compiles down to just 30 kbytes which configs the
interface and does the copy and uncompress.

-- g