Questions about clone installations on RedHat Enterprise 4

Tue Sep 12 16:24:33 UTC 2006

to what extent?
the software installed and filesystem layout?
the software installed, fs layout, and all of the configuration files?

both of these are possible.
You can use disk|filesystem images (tools like Ghost, Mondo Rescue,
Partimage and many others are capable of this)

You can also use kickstart files to install multiple machines with
exactly the same configurations (this would be my preferred option,
unless the configurations you need to do involve an awful lot of
third-party software and driver installations)

> Is it a recommended installation procedure?

Yes, absolutely
Kickstart is a supported installation method.
on the other hand, disk imaging would reuire you to use software that
Red Hat do not ship or support, but other companies may support software
that does this.

> How do I prepare a clone to install on other servers, what considerations
> should I have?

network/other system-specific config files will differ on systems that
are built from a ghosted image (unless everything is automatically
configured using something like DHCP)
Disk images usually rely on hard disks being at least the same size in
your clone builds

> Can I easily modify the File Systems on a server installed with a clone?

in what way?
size and layout?
this is where kickstart might come in useful. If you leave filesystem
information out of a kickstart profile you will be prompted for this
(and only this).
kickstart profiles are also trivial to copy and alter - they are just
plain text files, after all. i have about 12 of them on my laptop right
now. on the other hand they will usually require a network-based install
server for really efficient setups, but this will only need setting up once.
Altering a full system image is likely to be more complicated than this,
and each image you keep takes up a lot of space, even with compression.

> The pros and cons of making a clone installation?

Nearly all of the machines I administer are installed in precisely this
way -   I use a combination of PXE and kickstart profiles to set up many
different system profiles.

Kickstart does not clone your user data, however, it is a set of
installation instructions that can be given to the Red Hat system
installer (aka anaconda)

If you are only looking at repeating the setup process in identical ways
on multiple systems, that are all running RHEL, then /me opines that
kickstart is a good choice.

in a mixed environment I might be tempted to use system imaging instead,
which would work for almost any OS.

regards

Stuart

- --
Stuart Sears RHCA RHCX
"Quit worrying about your health. It'll go away."
- - Robert Orben
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