[K12OSN] Server Clone

[Joe O'Brien]

We had a home-grown setup to do this. We ran dual boot boxes in the attempt
to get people to run linux, though sadly it was not successful in more than
a few cases.

Build the install (linux, windows). Boot to NFS floppy. Tarball, gzip and
upload tar.gz to NFS server.
Boot to NFS on the next machine, have default scripts (that had a 1 minute
to cancel timeout) that fdisk the harddrive based on total size, formated
the drive and wget'd the tarball from an internal server.  Reboot and you
are done.  Also put the nfs floppy on the harddrive and could access it
from lilo so you could reclone it without a floppy.  Had some trouble with
dos formating under linux, so created a minidos partition with format and
some init images.  Worked great.  You could reclone from the harddrive off
of a 100Mbit network in around 15minutes.

--thanks
--joe

At 08:14 AM 5/28/2004 -0700, you wrote:
>This discussion is making me think about the following possibility:
>
>A CD based distro with GUI and full hardware detection, with the
>specific purpose of replicating hard drives and re-imaging, just as
>ghost does now, but without the annoying problems of DOS drivers and
>MoBo compatability that messes Ghost up.
>
>I'd like to be able to drop a CD in, boot from it, have a nice GUI load,
>tell it where my network share is that contains or will receive the
>image, tell it what hard drive to copy to or from, and SHAZAM.....cloned
>Linux, Windows or whatever. 
>
>It looks to me that all the parts already exist. Anyone up for joining
>me in a project like this?
>
>Doug Gough
>