Re: [Sheflug] Disk Duplicating with Linux

[Peter Duffy <xxxxx [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

If I were faced with this, my first thought would be to try to do
something using Redhat's kickstart facility: it allows you to modify and
automate the Linux install, including the ability to run custom
post-install scripts. And it can all be done from the network (I'm
currently installing Linux on a number of Sparcs: effectively, I just do
"boot net ks" from the openboot prompt, and it uses tftp to grab a
kernel/root image, then finds the kickstart config file using NFS: this
then tells it everything else it needs to know about the install.)

Caveats with kickstart:

1) It's incredibly sparsely documented, and what documentation there is
is appallingly out-of-date (and it's often difficult to match the docs
to the kickstart versions.) (Redhat really SHOULD do something about
this!) 

2) The underlying facility, anaconda, is written in python (geddit?)
Very complex and dense python at that, and the code isn't commented:
hence,  trying to trace and fix oddities (of which there are many) is a
serious challenge which, to date, I have personally only partly solved.
 
If you can get your head round it, it's massively flexible, and could
probably be persuaded to grab other-system images and dd them onto
partitions. Might be worth a look ...


On Thu, 2002-05-16 at 11:13, Dawson, Alan wrote:
> Hi,  I wonder if anybody can give me some pointers on disk duplication.
> 
> I would like to be able to clone PC's (with  a variety of OS - Win98, Linux,
> WinXP).  I imagine I can boot with a linux floppy - and mount the local
> drives and dd them to an NFS path .. or something like that.  Anybody got
> better ideas, or aware of pitfalls.  There will be NTFS5 file systems
> involved


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