[CentOS] disk duplication question

Fri Sep 9 16:12:01 UTC 2011
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 8:16 AM, Jerry Geis <geisj at pagestation.com> wrote:
>
>> Take a look at automated install using pxe. That way you can install all
>> clients identical with a short command on each client. Some scripting is
>> of course necessary to define the kickstart scripts. Several good
>> tutorials on this topic are available. Below is the a link to the centos
>> intro on this.
>>
>> http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/Installation_Guide-en-US/ch-kickstart2.html
>>
> Thomas,
>
> I do use PXE install, however, in this case it takes upwards of 2 hours
> plus for each box
> to install CentOS and all my "other" items.
>
> With disk duplication I can copy 11 disks in 30 minutes.

Clonezilla (especially with the drbl server) can do this pretty
quickly over the network without having to juggle disks, but you end
up with the same problem with the NICs - and in fact you will have it
with any method of backing up and restoring on a different machine so
it is something to consider even if you aren't cloning.   On 5.x,
kudzu would normally run on the new machine, rename all the
NIC-related files and create new default dhcp-based copies.  Not sure
how 6.0 works in that respect.  If it doesn't do it automatically, you
could make an init script that would do it on startup and then remove
itself.   6.1 is supposed to have some more sensible ways of naming
the NICs but I don't know how they work yet.   When I update my
existing servers I'll probably work out a script that gathers all of
the mac/ip/route info from the running machines into a table I can
include in the master image along with the script that re-creates the
configurations based on the MAC it finds.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com