Dag Wieers wrote:
The clonezilla live project is a really nice way to do image-copies of machines: http://clonezilla.sourceforge.net/clonezilla-live/ but it's based on a Debian live OS which has some unfamiliar quirks. Has anyone built something like this on a Centos base?
For anyone who hasn't seen it, it can do whole disk or partition copies of windows and most Linux filesystems and it knows enough to only copy the used parts of the disk. Among other tricks, it can also build a bootable iso image containing itself and one or more images that you can load directly from the cd/dvd.
Seems similar to partimage. If you use Recovery Is Possible (RIP) you have a small image (77MB) that contains a recent kernel with all tools you can imagine (with ntfs, cifs, partimage, ...)
You can put RIP on a small USB stick, or ISO or PXE.
Clonzilla probably uses the same underlying tools, plus ntfsclone as the default option for ntfs partitions, but I think it has better network support with options for multicast mass-cloning and the ability to store/load the images over nfs/smb/sshfs as well as local storage. It works fine as-is. I just wondered if anyone had done the same on a centos-live distribution base. One thing that would be a great addition would be if, after the image is restored to the disk, you could drop into the equivalent of a rescue mode boot and be able to chroot to the newly installed system without needed a reboot. But, I guess the NICs might not be detected as the same devices when booted with different kernels, initrd's or modprobe.conf files anyway.