[K12OSN] Drive copy utils... Linux Mobile Lab

[Christopher K. Johnson]

Les Mikesell wrote:

> If you have an intermediate place to dump the image:
>
> Boot the knoppix CD on the master machine.
> Open a root shell.
> dd if=/dev/hda |gzip |ssh storage_server "cat >/path/to/image"
> enter root password when prompted
> go away for a long time
>
>Boot the knoppix CD on a target machine.
>Open a root shell.
>ssh storage_server zcat /path/to/image |dd of=/dev/hda
> enter the root password when prompted 
> go away for a long time
> remove knoppix CD & reboot when finished
>  
>
You didn't say what size the drives are and whether they are all 
identical systems (and hard drives models).  But if they are the same 
and the above dd copy is a viable solution, then there is another dd 
based solution which may have better performance, depending on whether 
your bottleneck is likely to be cpu or network bandwidth and latency.

On the master machine:
Boot knoppix CD or K12LTSP/Fedora CD1 entering 'linux rescue' at boot 
prompt, choose to start network, skip mounting filesystems.
Open a root shell.
Create a mount point directory (e.g. /mnt/point).
Mount an nfs export from server on that mount point.
dd if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/point/mobile_hda.img bs=10M
wait

On a target machine:
Boot knoppix CD or K12LTSP/Fedora CD1 entering 'linux rescue' at boot 
prompt, choose to start network, skip mounting filesystems.
Open a root shell.
Create a mount point directory (e.g. /mnt/point).
Mount an nfs export from server on that mount point.
dd if=/mnt/point/mobile_hda.img of=/dev/hda bs=10M
wait
apply SSID correction per other messages in thread

This will take more space on the server, but using the UDP based NFS 
transport and not trying to compress/decompress it at the workstation 
and encrypt/decrypt it at both ends for ssh may be faster.

The SSID correction I think needs to be done on each target machine, 
since doing so on the master will still result in identical SSIDs on the 
targets.

Chris

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------
   "Spend less!  Do more!  Go Open Source..." -- Dirigo.net
   Chris Johnson, RHCE #807000448202021