On Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 05:42:14PM -0800, smith wrote:
> 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. (...)
> > 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.
>
> 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.
If this is not something that you do very often, I'd go with the
*simple* solution: zero a drive, install Windows, put a compressed image
on some handy fileserver, and use ftp, gunzip, and dd to get it to the
new disk. I haven't tried any of this, but I'd imagine the image would
only be slightly larger than what frisbee and friends produce. And a lot
easier to uncompress on whatever machine you are on today.
Of course, you'd have to weigh OpenBSD's security and stability (and
hence, fewer new versions of the imaging disk to solve security
problems) versus Linux' better [1] NTFS implementation.
Joachim
[1] I presume; NTFS is not enabled in GENERIC, and I've never used it on
OpenBSD. I can testify reading NTFS worked just fine the couple of times
I tried it from Linux.
