Questions about clone installations on RedHat Enterprise 4

[Rick Stevens]

On Tue, 2006-09-12 at 11:30 -0400, Andres Lefever wrote:
> Hello, I´m new with Linux systems and I certainly will appreciate any
> feedback.
> 
>  
> 
> Is it possible to clone a RedHat Enterprise 4 installation?

Yes.

> Is it a recommended installation procedure?

I don't know if it's "recommended", but it works fine.

> How do I prepare a clone to install on other servers, what
> considerations should I have?

Depends on your mechanism.  If you ghost the drive (either by using
Norton Ghost itself or one of the Linux ghost work-alikes), you must
meet the ghost requirements (same size drive, etc.).  I have ghost
images of machines on CDs and USB/Firewire hard drives.  Note that
these ghost images are made BEFORE a machine has been configured (e.g.
before "firstboot" is ever run).

> Can I easily modify the File Systems on a server installed with a
> clone?

It's a clone.  The same restrictions you have on the original will be
in place on the clone.  If you're talking about resizing filesystems
and the like via LVM, you must have free partition space available, etc.

> The pros and cons of making a clone installation?

It's certainly faster than a fresh install.  You have to change things
such as the hostname of the machine and update the network
configuration.   You may wish to run "firstboot --configure" as well.

Once that's done, if you plan to use up2date, you'll need to purge out
the /etc/sysconfig/rhn directory and regenerate the stuff via
"up2date --configure" and register it via "up2date --register".

----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-    Admitting you have a problem is the first step toward getting   -
-    medicated for it.      -- Jim Evarts (http://www.TopFive.com)   -
----------------------------------------------------------------------