[wplug] Linux imaging

[larry at daberko.com]

Wow, there are some good ideas.  I took some of them and searched and
decided to go with Ghost 4 Linux (g4l).  The directions that I followed
are at http://bhavesh.freeshell.org/cloninghd.html

Pros are bit-by-bit copy.  Cons are that it copies the entire drive,
including the blank spots.

I checked and all the drives are identical.  I did fill the drive with a
big file full of zeros then deleted.  The 80GB drive image shrunk down to
1.3 GB with gzip compression.  Takes less than 30 minutes to install.

I scrounged up a spare box to use as an ftp storage to enable me to do
multiple installs.

I'm confident that things will go smooth tomorrow.  Thanks for all your
suggestions again.

-Larry Daberko

> Hi, I've been tasked with installing 10 Fedora8 boxes.  I plan to make one
> master install and copy that to the 9 others.  The boxes are all the same
> model, if not exactly the same.
>
> The data size is 5GB,  HDD size 80GB, network is 100Mbps.
>
> I'm reading various methods of imaging Linux.
> dd - Will work, but copies every bit on the drive
> tar - have to partition and load bootloader.
> dump/restore - I've done in BSD, but never Linux.
> pulling drives - I'd rather avoid that.
>
> The master will be installed in the shop, while the copies will be done at
> the customer's site.  I might have access to a windows laptop if needed.
> I may be able to do multiple machines at once if any are available.
>
> What would you recommend doing in this situation?
>
> Thanks,
> -Larry Daberko
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