[CentOS] Three Identical systems - short cut to setting up the drives?

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Fri Jul 4 18:47:38 UTC 2008


Robert Moskowitz wrote:
>
>> It will be many times faster than doing DD images of entire drives. 
>> eg. in my case here, i can provision a new machine in 2 min and 43 
>> seconds for a base+core minimal centos-5 install. installing over http 
>> from a machine on a GiB/sec link and installing to a 2 disk raid-1 

> There is much good to say about using kickstart method than learning a 
> new approach like Clonezilla. I have not used kickstart since Centos 
> 4.something, so I have no good notes and will have to dig again. But 
> this is pretty much a one-time clone and Clonezilla does not seem to set 
> up the partitioning info on the new drive so that would be one more 
> thing to learn.

You are reading the wrong thing about clonezilla.  In disk image mode it 
will duplicate the partitioning for you and it knows enough about most 
filesystems to just copy the used portions.  There are options to just 
take one partition if you want, but if you do the whole disk it will set 
up the partitions for you.  It understands LVM, but not multi-disk 
software raid.  I'd expect it to be faster than any other way to 
duplicate systems if you don't count downloading the iso and making your 
initial image copy from the master.

> So I take the anaconda-ks.cfg file, add stuff so it will boot off the 
> network and use the update repo as well as the base. Then rediscover the 
> command to run linux from a kickstart file on a diskette.
> 
> Piece of CAKE!

Clonezilla can also be network-booted if you have enough machines to be 
worth the trouble to set up (and it can clone windows and other linux 
distributions as well).  There is a companion project called DRBL that 
handles network booting and provides NFS storage for the clients to save 
and load images.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com




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