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

Fri Jul 4 19:34:24 UTC 2008
Robert Moskowitz <rgm at htt-consult.com>

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.
>