Sorin Srbu wrote:

Hi all,

I'm looking for a cloning solution for our Windows/Linux/*nix computer park and ran into Clonezilla. Apparantely the DRBL and other documentation mentions CentOS as a suitable base for it.

Does anybody on this list use this solution and can say something about it in the running-Clonezilla-with-CentOS-context, be it recommendations, gotchas', warnings or whatever?

Works nicely for my only purpose - Windows backup.

Installs like an appliance - it will stomp on several config files without warning. Best to try it out on a test box or virtual machine.

Had to sort through many small scripts to get it to do what I wanted. Main ones I edited were /opt/drbl/sbin/ocs-functions, /opt/drbl/lang/bash/en_US, /tftpboot/nbi_img/pxelinux.cfg/default. Use only one network, shut off nis master, made it a secondary dhcpd server, NFS mount the image storage point off another box.

The logger service /opt/drbl/sbin/ocsmgrd didn't work the way I liked, so I use cobbled something together using nc.

Because I changed around some files, I have to be careful with drbl/clonezilla updates.

I found it useful to have spare disk/LVM space on the server to restore images to, easier restore of a single file or dir. Needs to be equal/larger than the biggest client disk.

I had to move it from an x86_64 to i386 Centos - not all my client cpus could run 64bit.

PXE boot other stuff like systemrescue, C5 install/rescue, DBAN, etc.

I never posted anything, but Steven Shiau, the maintainer, seems responsive to questions on the mail list.