[K12OSN] Server Clone

[Josiah Ritchie]

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb will copy the entire disk bit for bit, it
takes time and requires the hard drives to be both mounted in the same
machine. as long as you don't confuse your if (input file) and you of
(output file) you are fine. I've done it on a whole lab of XP machines
as I don't own Ghost and each 30G (IIRC) IDE drives took a couple hours.
It was a 2 day process on the 10 PCs. I used the Gentoo LiveCD. I don't
know how this would affect a running system's performance, but I'd
expect it wouldn't be a good idea.

I've heard of people managing to do this between 2 different machines,
but don't recall how it was done. Think it had something to do with ssh.
I'm sure it was even slower...

JSR/

On Fri, 2004-05-28 at 09:32, Jim Kronebusch wrote:
> [SNIP]
> > rsync would be my knee jerk response but I've never done a 
> > complete system before and don't know if that would work.
> 
> Well I have been trying a few different things, restore was the first
> from a full system dump to NFS mount via webmin without any luck.  The
> other was rsync but my syntax is very questionable (rsync -e ssh -avz
> --delete-after user at server:/ /), that managed to render my new server
> unbootable afterwards :-)  I am really nervous about entering the wrong
> command and killing files on the original server.  Also if I get
> something to work, I am worried about whether or not it will be a true
> clone or if only enough files are alike to seem that way which could
> lead to problems down the road.  Both servers will eventually maintain a
> separate user base but all software on both will be identical.