Identical systems

[Les Mikesell]

On Fri, 2005-01-07 at 18:07, Ashley M. Kirchner wrote:
>     What's the easiest way to, after a system gets setup (FC3 installed 
> fresh on the drive), "replicate" it across other machines with the same 
> hardware?  Basically I want to end up with several machines with the 
> same setup and programs.

If the hard disks are identical, you can do a complete image copy which
will take the boot setup, partitioning et. along.  This is really easy
with servers that have swappable drive carriers, but you can also do
it over the network.  I usually boot a knoppix CD because it detects
most hardware and comes up with the network running. Start an sshd
server on the master, then from the clone machine do something like:
ssh master_ip_address dd if=/dev/hda |dd of=/dev/hda  (appropriate
disk names, of course). Go to lunch - it will take a while.  Repeat
if more than one drive is involved.  Boot the new machine up and
change it's name and ip address.

If the drives aren't identical you can do approximately the same
by partitioning/formatting the new drive yourself, then copying
via tar to the new locations, but in this case you have to make
the disk bootable yourself. 

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    les at futuresource.com