At 2005-07-21 19:20:34+0000, "Eli K. Breen" writes: > All, > > Does anyone have a good handle on how to replicate (read: image) a > freebsd machine from one machine to an ostensibly similar machine? > > So far I've used countless variations and combinations of the following: > > dd (Slow, not usefull if the hardware isn't identical?)
I have used dd | gzip -9 on many occasions. I don't find it especially slow (it will run at full disk bandwidth, typically 50 MB/sec on current ATA desktop disks, i.e. 3G/minute), and if you want an actual bit-for-bit identical replication then it's the only way to go. It's also very handy for keeping multi-boot slice images around (e.g. images of Windows partitions in various states, for testing purposes). The compressed images often end up nice and small. The disadvantage you may have is that your slice table and/or partition table will be wrong if your target machine has a larger disk. This is pretty easy to fix after the fact with a script using disklabel and/or fdisk. You will get better compression if you dd /dev/zero to your source machine before the initial installation, so that empty sectors are all zeroes. One day I will write a program which zeroes empty blocks of an unmounted filesystem.... > tar (Doesn't replicate MBR) > rsync (No MBR support) Replicating the MBR is exceptionally easy with dd: it's the first sector of the disk. Note that this first sector also includes the slice table. You could easily use dd in combination with tar and rsync. > Norton Ghost (Doesn't support UFS/UFS2?) > G4U (little experience with this) I notice that 'dump' is not in your list. Why is that? Nick Barnes Ravenbrook Limited _______________________________________________ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
