On Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 03:53:48PM -0500, Steve Shockley wrote: > smith wrote: > >Why?: > > > >I've received a few new computers that I have to configure. > > http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#Multiple
Disk imaging Unfortunately, there are no known disk imaging packages which are FFS-aware and can make an image containing only the active file space. Most of the major disk imaging solutions will treat an OpenBSD partition as a "generic" partition, and can make an image of the whole disk. This often accomplishes your goal, but usually with huge amounts of wasted space -- an empty, 10G /home partition will require 10G of space in the image, even if there isn't a single file in it. While you can typically install a drive image to a larger drive, you would not be able to directly use the extra space, and you would not be able to install an image to a smaller drive. --- I don't believe that section is entirely correct, frisbee includes both filesystem aware as well as filesystem naive compression algorithms to be used when creating disk images. Frisbee can also do installs via multicast and the paper referenced below includes data showing that install times remain pretty much constant no matter how many systems are being setup at once. Emulab (emulab.com) can push images to hundreds of their machines in under two minutes. I must admit that I have yet to use frisbee myself. I'm cloning disks at this very minute, but due to time constraints have had to use our existing solution (Acronis). We're having problems due to lack of nic driver support with newer systems, but I expect to be able to create a BSD boot disc with the needed drivers along with the frisbee client in the near future. Another method that might work for you is to get one machine setup and then mirror the boot drive. You may then be able to detach a sub-mirror and move it to a different system. -Damian [1] http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/papers/frisbee-usenix03-base.html
