[K12OSN] Cloning Fedora mailproxy box

[John Lucas]

It has been awhile since I used it, but I have had some success using Mondo 
Archive to create bootable CDs for bare-metal recovery. I wouldn't suggest 
backing up large data partitions this way (would take forever), but all the 
system partitions (can span multiple discs) and after a "mondorestore" the 
drive should be bootable. Back up your data onto tape or another fileserver 
(anything but CDs).

As for the question about identical hardware, it is not nearly as hopeless as 
Windows in this regard. Anaconda should pick up hardware changes and allow 
you to re-configure changed hardware (on boot). As another responder 
mentioned, you have to watch for architectural differences (athlon vs. intel, 
32 vs 64-bit) and disk types (IDE vs. SCSI). Study your /etc/fstab file to 
discover how many of what kind of drives you have and what partitions are 
mounted where. Use "df -h" to find the physical drive names and partition 
sizes. You can restore an image onto smaller drive(s).

You could try restoring your mondo CDs to a VMWare virtual machine. It should 
work and would make this disk cloning stuff a thing of the past. I use tar to 
copy my virtual machines and can restore them to another VMWare server (and 
even VMWare Player). VMWare Server is free.

On Saturday 16 September 2006 12:00, k12osn-request at redhat.com wrote:
> Message: 25
> Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2006 23:06:24 -0700
> From: "Marty Willie" <mwillie at r9esd.k12.or.us>
> Subject: [K12OSN] Cloning Fedora mailproxy box
> To: <k12osn at redhat.com>
> Message-ID: <450B31F00200009C00004371 at r9-cn01.r9esd.k12.or.us>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> Hi all,
>
> I'm what you would call a newbie to Linux.... My director of technology and
> Linux guru just accepted a position at Google and left the rest of us to
> tend to the Linux farm.
>
> Mailproxy1 is currently running Fedora Core 5, and my objective is to
> create an image of this machine before it inevitably tips over and we have
> to put the pieces back together - Based on the tech dept’s current Linux
> knowledge, this would be a disaster.
>
> We have located an image of this machine from two years ago, however when
> we recently attempted to pull this image down onto what we had hoped would
> become mailproxy2, the machine would not boot. Can you image a Linux box
> running Fedora? If so, does the image have to be pushed down onto an
> identical set of hardware, as is the case with a Windows box?
>
> Thanks in advance for any help you can supply.
> Marty

-- 
        "History doesn't repeat itself; at best it rhymes."
                        - Mark Twain

| John Lucas                          MrJohnLucas at gmail.com               |
| St. Thomas, VI 00802                http://mrjohnlucas.googlepages.com/ |
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