I've done cloning for many years with tar:
On the source machine, boot from an SL live CD and mount the source's root
file system. Make a tar file of this system with a command like:
cd /mnt/wherever
tar -cSf - . | ssh someuser@somewhere 'cat >mysystem.tar'
Then, on the target, boot the live CD, partition the disk, create the
root filesystem and mount it. THen untar the contents with something
like:
cd /mnt/wherever
ssh someuser@somewhere cat mysystem.tar | tar -xpSf -
You may need to change /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/grub.conf, if the
partition layout is different or the files use UUIDs. In the latter case,
I just change to partition names (e.g./dev/sda1).
Then run grub to install the boot loader:
grub
root (hd0,X)
setup (hd0)
This works great as long as the hardware is similar enough that the
initrd/initramfs still works. Otherwise, there's an extra step to
regenerate it, which I can explain if people want.
Steve Gaarder
System Administrator, Dept of Mathematics
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
[email protected]
On Tue, 29 Jan 2013, Yasha Karant wrote:
We have a limited, small, number of IEEE 802.3 connected hardware platform
identical workstations to clone -- no 802.11 nor any shared (remote,
distributed) disk storage (at this time). My plan was to get one fully
operational and configured, and then clone the hard drive image onto the
remaining machines one hard drive at a time.
Let A represent the operational (clone source) machine, and Bhd a target hard
drive. The hard drive on A is /dev/sda, call it Ahd. A is shut down power
off. Bhd is installed into an available bay on A, A is booted, and Bhd
appears as /dev/sdb in A. Using dd on A, clone /dev/sda to /dev/sdb . Mount
on A the partition of /dev/sdb that contains /etc (there are no end user home
directories -- only home directories are those of the system administration
users). Using a text editor (e.g., vi), modify the /etc/sysconfig/net*
scripts/directories, as well as /etc/hosts. for the name and IP address of
machine B that will contain Bhd (resolv.conf will be the same -- all of these
machines are in the same DNS subzone, same TCP/IP subnet). Iterate through
all of the target workstation hard drives. As there are no other distributed
services running, this should suffice.
Shutdown A, remove Bhd, install Bhd into B, boot B upon which Bhd should
appear as /dev/sda . Done.
Is there a better method in terms of software? At this time, I do not want
to setup a remote image server that effectively will download the full image
of Ahd onto Bhd over a network, nor do I want to make a custom install DVD as
we only have a small number of workstations to clone, not, say, one hundred.
I do understand that if Ahd and Bhd present different bad blocks to the OS,
and these are not "hidden" by the intelligence on each individual hard drive,
then dd may not work. However, the drives already have been surveyed and the
bad block situation should not be an issue.
A related question (that was partially addressed in a different thread): is
there a way to remove/disable Network Manager and use a traditional static
configuration? On a laptop that needs to move within the field from one
802.11 network to another, with a different DNS zone and TCP/IP
configuration, Network Manager provides similar ease and functionality to the
end user autoconfiguration applications that are used under Mac OS X or
modern MS Win. This is unnecessary and in some sense dangerous for static
workstations that need no such dynamic configuration.
My thought was to find the RPM that installs Network Manager and simply
uninstall it, either via yum or a simple rpm -e command. Is Network Manager
too deeply ingrained in current EL6 (using TUV compliant model) to make this
feasible?
Yasha Karant
