[K12OSN] Drive copy utils... Linux Mobile Lab

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, 2004-04-08 at 12:14, pnelson wrote:
> Hello Folks,
> 
> I have 26 new IBM laptops ready for use in our new Linux Mobile Lab. I
> have one of them all configured and ready to go. The hard drive was
> repartitioned so it now dual boots XP and Fedora Core 2.
> 
> I could use Ghost to replicate the drives on the other 25 but I don't
> want to pay for any Ghost licenses. What's the easiest way to make an
> image of this drive (both partitions) and then send it back out again to
> the other 25 machines?
> 
> I was thinking of using the Knoppix CD and doing something with nfs but
> I'm hoping that the expertise of the K12OSN list will keep me from doing
> any wheel inventing at all.

If you have an intermediate place to dump the image:
 Boot the knoppix CD on the master machine.
 Open a root shell.
 dd if=/dev/hda |gzip |ssh storage_server "cat >/path/to/image"
 enter root password when prompted
 go away for a long time

Boot the knoppix CD on a target machine.
Open a root shell.
ssh storage_server zcat /path/to/image |dd of=/dev/hda
 enter the root password when prompted 
 go away for a long time
 remove knoppix CD & reboot when finished

I'm not sure what this does to the XP license mechanism. It will break
win2k's SSID mechanism if you are using a domain since every machine is
supposed to have a unique ssid.

---
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com