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. >