On Fri, 26 Jan 2007 16:07:01 -0600, Damian Wiest wrote > 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
Sorry guys, I now realise my error by not revealing that I'm imaging windows boxes. I'm not too concerned about the disadvantages or gotchas of imaging. I was just looking for a quick and dirty way of getting that windows image back on to a computer from an ftp server. If I figure out how to get OpenBSD to do what g4u does, then I've found an even simpler solution to this type a problem than g4u.
