[CentOS] Symantec ghost and CentOS 3.4/4.0

Mon Oct 3 16:22:40 UTC 2005
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On Mon, 2005-10-03 at 11:06, Ted Kaczmarek wrote:

> >             Anyone have any experience getting ghost to do a
> > successful image with CentOS, Fedora, or RHEL? It worked great with
> > RH9, but now a days I find it nearly impossible to get it to work
> > properly. Any tips would be helpful. We spin up a large number of
> > servers on a weekly basis and it would be nice to just be able to
> > image them.
> > 
> 
> If you are not using any third party software maintaining a a yum repository instead 
> of spinning images may be an alternative for you. Even with third party stuff with the 
> proper QA procedures you should not have any issues.
> If you have supported copy of ghost taking the issue up with Symantec would be for the
> betterment of the community at large.

Or, if the machines are close to identical including the drives, just
use dd to copy the whole disk.  It's slow in real-time but takes very
little human time.  If you have swappable drive carriers you can boot
a suitable master machine with the Centos install disk in rescue mode
to run the dd command, then swap the drive in place and bring the
new machine up in single user mode to change the hostname and IP.  Or
boot the new machine in rescue mode and bring up the network or use
knoppix CD, then use ssh to access an image over the network that you
write to the local drive with dd.  Start it up and go to lunch and
you won't notice that it took a long time to complete...

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com