[CentOS] Mass installs of desktop systems on identical machines

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Tue Oct 14 12:34:02 UTC 2008


Niki Kovacs wrote:
> How 
> would it *technically* be possible to replicate these installs as easily 
> as possible? The hardware is always the same, so I wonder: I have a 
> vague idea about disk images (to be more precise: I know disk images 
> well as far as burning CDs on the commandline is concerned, or when it 
> comes to installing an OS in VirtualBox using the .iso)... but is there 
> a way to somehow transform an existing install into a disk image, and 
> then simply copy these over to all the other machines? (I've never done 
> this)

Clonezilla is probably the fastest/easiest way.  There are 2 versions. 
Clonezilla-live boots from a CD or USB drive and lets you save or 
restore a disk or partition image using local or network storage via 
nfs, sshfs, or samba.  For windows and most linux filesystems it knows 
enough to only save the used portions of the disk.  You can also make a 
bootable DVD containing an image to load.  For large numbers of machines 
there is the companion drbl to network-boot into clonezilla. 
http://clonezilla.org/

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com




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