[CentOS] Three Identical systems - short cut to setting up the drives?
Robert Moskowitz
rgm at htt-consult.com
Fri Jul 4 19:34:24 UTC 2008
I am building the Clonezilla live CD now....
Les Mikesell wrote:
> 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.
>
More information about the CentOS
mailing list