> All that would work if you wanted to take the machines offline to > do that, but these machines are going to be handling 30MB/min of > streaming data for 6 months at a clip. There's no way that would work. :( > > > hmmm just a slightly evil thought.... > > anyone tried > > cat /dev/hda1 > /dev/hdb1 > > assuming hda1 and hdb1 are similar partition sizes and types.... > > Tried it... doesnt work.
you can't use cat, but if the drives are identical you can use dd (We use that to clone identical copies of drives here). As for package maintenance, once you have one machine set up the way you want, you can get the package list using dpkg --get-selections, save that to a file. Then reverse it (ie: dpkg --set-selections < filename) on the next machine after updating the package list. Then you you don't need to use dselect or do much work on the other machines and maintenance becomes pretty painless. Come these things into an install/update script and then you can pretty much automate everything except for answering all the questions that come up during an install (in my case, I just keep tabs of these config files on the master machine and rdist them across afterwards). This is how I keep our 50 or so linux machines in sync... If you are using hamm the dpkg-mountable method is pretty nice since it only loads packages that are needed as opposed to recursing down all the directories. -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .