One step further (WAS: Re: Advanced hard disk mirroring!)
The high quality replies I received (especially from Jens B. Jorgensen) solved my problem. (see http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-user-0001/msg02027.html) It also gave me an idea: Wouldn't it be great if there was ONE Linux boot-floppy that would mount (SMB or NFS?) a complete filesystem after the initial boot over a network (and complete the boot sequence?). I'm probable not the first who came up with this idea, so does anyone know If such a thing is already pulled off? Regards, Onno
Re: Advanced hard disk mirroring!
On Tue, 18 Jan 2000, Jens B. Jorgensen wrote: [excellent post snipped] A really simple way to do this is to use multicast ghost. Make a boot floppy with a packet driver to suit the NIC Use it or 50 copies of it to boot the 50 workstations and run ghost Run dhcp somewhere. Run ghostsrv somewhere and do the whole lab at once. Lindsay Onno Ebbinge wrote: I'm a sysadmin and have two Debian GNU/Linux potato servers and 50 windows 95 workstations under my care. My problem is with the 50 workstations: (the 50 workstations have the same hardware) I want to install ONE workstation and then mirror the hard disk to all other workstations. The first time I did it was with ghost and I hooked up the installed hard disk to every client and mirrored it... Not a nice job to do and there must be a better way do do it! I know that ghost CAN use NETBIOS connections and such but I don't know how to boot it from a 1.44 flop and then use ghost. My question: I want to boot the workstation to be installed from a floppy with Linux or DOS. Then I want to make a connection to my server (or the installed workstation) and mirror the hard disk from a file (or hard disk). Frankly I don't care what is used or how it's being done (Linux/DOS with dd/ghost or something else!) but I don't want to hook-up all 50 workstations again... Thanks for any ideas, Onno -- Jens B. Jorgensen [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] /dev/null =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Lindsay Allen [EMAIL PROTECTED] Perth, Western Australia voice +61 8 9316 2486 32.0125S 115.8445E Debian Linux =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Re: Advanced hard disk mirroring!
On Tue, Jan 18, 2000 at 11:43:17AM +0100, Onno Ebbinge wrote: I'm a sysadmin and have two Debian GNU/Linux potato servers and 50 windows 95 workstations under my care. My problem is with the 50 workstations: (the 50 workstations have the same hardware) I want to install ONE workstation and then mirror the hard disk to all other workstations. The first time I did it was with ghost and I hooked up the installed hard disk to every client and mirrored it... Not a nice job to do and there must be a better way do do it! I know that ghost CAN use NETBIOS connections and such but I don't know how to boot it from a 1.44 flop and then use ghost. My question: I want to boot the workstation to be installed from a floppy with Linux or DOS. Then I want to make a connection to my server (or the installed workstation) and mirror the hard disk from a file (or hard disk). Frankly I don't care what is used or how it's being done (Linux/DOS with dd/ghost or something else!) but I don't want to hook-up all 50 workstations again... Thanks for any ideas, Onno I'm doing the same with a 486 server and a bunch of 386 workstations, all IBM stuff with MCA buses, over a token-ring network, with small (~70MB-~200MB) SCSI drives. Basically, I made a boot disk that mounts a NFS filesystem over the network and chroots to it. That image mounts another NFS filesystem with all the Win95 stuff on it. Everything pretty much works, except the bootblock stuff (which I should get working tomorrow), and I have yet to add the small random-number generator that will assign a unique SMB computer name to the computer in a registry file that will be imported on first bootup. This all needs to be on one disk, because we all know the windows computers will periodically have to be scratched and reinstalled, and this is a one-time job for me, so I need to make it as easy as possible for those who will maintain it. If all your hard drives are the same size, you could probably just do a dd from, say, /dev/sda or /dev/hda to a file and back, and that would copy all the partition tables and the like. Anyway, if you need some specific help, by all means, e-mail me and I'll see if I can help. -- If you continue running Windows, your system may become unstable. -- Windows 95 BSOD Dwayne C. Litzenberger - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please always Cc to me when replying to me on the lists. Advertising Policy: http://www.redrival.com/dlitz/spamoff.html GnuPG Public Key: http://www.redrival.com/dlitz/gpgkey.asc Fingerprint: 0535 F7CF FF5F 8547 E5A5 695E 4456 FB6C BC39 A4B0 pgptUP6Csv7tz.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Advanced hard disk mirroring!
hi onno i'd try something like... - use a bootable cdrom ( rescue disk )... - boot linux with network capability ( use linuxcare' bootable cdrom - business card size - if not use (slackware) root/boot floppy image - or use flash IDE disk to boot each w/s - than you don't need network either... just copy stuff over - use your copy command from the distribution server to the local server - i prefer not to use dd cause...it copies zeros too... tar will only copy data in each partition... - linux needs about 1.5gb of disk space... - on a 13Gb diskdd took about 2 hrs... - installing from scratch takes 15 minutes... - time vs doing it on 14 systemswas easier to run dd and go away...very painful waiting for it to copy 10Gb of empty disk - now...its toss up.. dd vs (complete install+patch_up_script.pl) - change the ip# for each script custom_mirror.pl 198.162.xx.yy ( should be all that is needed to mirror the distribution ( server to each local w/s - is there a debian or perl script(preferred) for doing this type of installs ?? have fun alvin # # dumb brute force way to mirror distribution server to n-workstations # # # fdisk the target disk than mount it # local_ws# mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/slave/ local_ws# mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/slave/var local_ws# mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/slave/usr # # mount the distribution server # local_ws# mount distribution#/ /mnt # # copy the linux setup from dist to each workstation # local_ws# cd /mnt local_ws# tar zcf - boot bin sbin usr home dev proc lib | ( cd /mnt/slave ; tar zxvfp - ) local_ws# umount /mnt local_ws# umount /mnt/slave/usr local_ws# umount /mnt/slave/var ... local_ws# umount /mnt/slave ... ... might need to use temprary lilo.conf to install new bootable image ... before running the w/s in stanalone/normal mode... # ... change the ip# of the local w/s ... increment ip# for next w/s on the dist server... ... # # done mirroring On Tue, 18 Jan 2000, Onno Ebbinge wrote: I'm a sysadmin and have two Debian GNU/Linux potato servers and 50 windows 95 workstations under my care. My problem is with the 50 workstations: (the 50 workstations have the same hardware) I want to install ONE workstation and then mirror the hard disk to all other workstations. The first time I did it was with ghost and I hooked up the installed hard disk to every client and mirrored it... Not a nice job to do and there must be a better way do do it! I know that ghost CAN use NETBIOS connections and such but I don't know how to boot it from a 1.44 flop and then use ghost. My question: I want to boot the workstation to be installed from a floppy with Linux or DOS. Then I want to make a connection to my server (or the installed workstation) and mirror the hard disk from a file (or hard disk). Frankly I don't care what is used or how it's being done (Linux/DOS with dd/ghost or something else!) but I don't want to hook-up all 50 workstations again... Thanks for any ideas, Onno -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] /dev/null
Advanced hard disk mirroring!
I'm a sysadmin and have two Debian GNU/Linux potato servers and 50 windows 95 workstations under my care. My problem is with the 50 workstations: (the 50 workstations have the same hardware) I want to install ONE workstation and then mirror the hard disk to all other workstations. The first time I did it was with ghost and I hooked up the installed hard disk to every client and mirrored it... Not a nice job to do and there must be a better way do do it! I know that ghost CAN use NETBIOS connections and such but I don't know how to boot it from a 1.44 flop and then use ghost. My question: I want to boot the workstation to be installed from a floppy with Linux or DOS. Then I want to make a connection to my server (or the installed workstation) and mirror the hard disk from a file (or hard disk). Frankly I don't care what is used or how it's being done (Linux/DOS with dd/ghost or something else!) but I don't want to hook-up all 50 workstations again... Thanks for any ideas, Onno
Re: Advanced hard disk mirroring!
I don't suppose your workstations have NICs with PXE support do they? If so you could use bpbatch (www.bpbatch.com) to boot them over the network. bpbatch supports a small scripting language which will allow you to partition the disks and load whole linux images into the disks (just what you want to do). I've used this and it works very well. If you don't have NICs with PXE support (unfortunately more likely the case) then it's worth the time to put together a boot disk which will load up networking services and then do ghost from a samba/NT/95 share. I've also used this method on a number of occasions. How do people put together a DOS disc with complete networking (including DHCP!)? They do it with a WindowsNT server utility called the Network Client Administrator. When you run it there's an option 'Make Network Installation Startup Disk'. I haven't actually used the tool myself to create a disk because a sysadmin here gave me one. I just update the disk with the NDIS driver appropriate to the target computer. Anyhow you boot from this disk and map the drive with the image and then you pop in your Ghost disk The next possibility is to boot linux off a diskette, set up the network, mount a filesystem over NFS, then dd the image onto the drive. I've also used this method using the debian rescue disk. This is a little more involved because the installation doesn't let you at the kernel modules (which you generally need to get the network going) until you've partitioned the disk and copied the modules onto the partitioned disk. I get by this by right away scrolling down to the option to run a shell and then in the shell get a second ram disk set up, mounted on /lib/modules, and then untar.gz the modules into this ram disk. Sound complicated? Well, only slightly. There's probably someone who's created a custom boot disk which takes care of all this nonsense but this is what I do. When you first boot from the rescue disk, at the boot: prompt type in 'linux ramdisk_size=8192'. This doubles the usual ramdisk size of 4MB to give us some extra breathing room. Once you get to the 'Debian GNU/Linux Installation Main Menu' just scroll down to 'Execute a Shell' and hit enter. At the shell prompt type: mke2fs /dev/ram1 This will create an 8MB ext2 filesystem on the second ram disk (the first one was loaded when the rescue disk booted). Now we create a directory for the modules and mount the ramdisk: mkdir /lib/modules mount /dev/ram1 /lib/modules Now we need to unpack the modules into our directory. Note that I'm using slink disks here. Things (filenames, etc.) might change for potato when it's released. Ok, so you pop in the drivers disk now and type: mount /dev/fd0 /floppy cd / zcat /floppy/modules.tgz | star Ok, now the modules are loaded into the ram disk. The next step is to load up whatever modules you need for your particular network card. Let's say we've got a card supported by the 3c59x driver. We then run: insmod 3c59x We'll also need NFS support so we'll have to load up that module. Once that's loaded we can configure the ethernet interface and mount the nfs volume with our disk image. insmod nfs ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.123 route add -net 192.168.0.0 eth0 mount -t nfs -o ro 192.168.0.1:/whatever /mnt And then use whatever image you've got of the disk to load it onto the drive, e.g. dd /mnt/theimage.bin /dev/hda1 There are lots of the regular utilities on the rescue disk image but beware lots of the only read/write from stdin/stdout and there are other curiosities (e.g. star will only _un_tar). If you need the full set of utilities you can always mount the entire filesystem of another linux box over NFS and then just get a good bash shell going like: LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/mnt/lib:/mnt/usr/lib PATH=/mnt/bin:/mnt/usr/bin:/mnt/sbin:/mnt/usr/sbin /mnt/bin/bash Anyhow that should get you started. If you have any more questions just drop me a line. Onno Ebbinge wrote: I'm a sysadmin and have two Debian GNU/Linux potato servers and 50 windows 95 workstations under my care. My problem is with the 50 workstations: (the 50 workstations have the same hardware) I want to install ONE workstation and then mirror the hard disk to all other workstations. The first time I did it was with ghost and I hooked up the installed hard disk to every client and mirrored it... Not a nice job to do and there must be a better way do do it! I know that ghost CAN use NETBIOS connections and such but I don't know how to boot it from a 1.44 flop and then use ghost. My question: I want to boot the workstation to be installed from a floppy with Linux or DOS. Then I want to make a connection to my server (or the installed workstation) and mirror the hard disk from a file (or hard disk). Frankly I don't care what is used or how it's being done (Linux/DOS with dd/ghost or something else!) but I don't want to hook-up all 50 workstations again... Thanks for any ideas,
