Re: Cloning disks with dd and netcat
Hi all,
I tried the dd route to do exactly the same thing. I wanted to recreate
a server or a variation of it quickly and easily. Eventually I gave up
and used systemimager instead. It is quick and simple. It is based on
rsync and it is in woody. I have it working using network boot and it
takes ~3 minutes to boot, partition and install a complete base server -
fully automatically. I am still playing with it as I want to script the
autoconfig of multiple copies of a base server, but it works brilliantly
for a simple clone as it is.
HTH
Giles
On Tue, 2004-07-27 at 11:12, David Ross wrote:
> Hi
>
> I'm having problems cloning a hard drive. What I want to try do is set
> aside a server on our internal network to store a whole bunch of server
> images. So instead of manually installing a new server and copying
> configs across, we just extract the appropriate image onto a harddrive.
>
> At the moment I've got an image on the image server but when extracting
> it to the new disk I am getting an error. I created the image by doing
> this:
>
> dd if=/dev/zero of=empty.tmp bs=1024
> count=FREEBLOCKSCOUNT
> rm empty.tmp
>
> This cleans up the disk space for each partition apparently for better
> compression, but I'm not sure about the 2nd line and FREEBLOCKSCOUNT.
> After this, which took a while, I issued the following from the image
> server which creates the image:
>
> nc -v -w 120 -p 3333 -l < /dev/null > image.gz
>
> Then from the machine we want to clone, I booted with a knoppix cd then
> set it up on the network then did this:
>
> dd if=/dev/had bs=512 | gzip -c | nc -v -w 60 <image server ip> 3333
>
> After a few hours, I ended up with image.gz sitting on the image server.
>
> Now, I've got a new 20Gb ready, slotted it into a new PC and booted with
> trusty knoppix. I then configured her on the int network with a DHCP
> assigned IP address.
>
> I then tried to cat the image from the image server across the network
> using netcat like the doc said. This is what I did:
>
> imgserver:/# cat image.gz | nc -v -w 120 -p 3333 -l
> listening on [any] 3333 ...
>
> Then I did this on the new pc with knoppix booted:
>
> tty1[/]# nc -v -w 60 XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX 3333 < /dev/null | gzip -dc | dd
> of=/dev/hda bs=512
> imgserver.whatever.co.za [XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX] 3333 (?) open
>
> Now it *should* be accepting the image through port 3333 and extracting
> it to /dev/had but after a few seconds the error:
>
> connect to [XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX] from fw.whatever.co.za [YYY.YYY.YYY.YYY]
> 1026
> too many output retries : Broken pipe
> imgserver:/#
>
> comes up on the image server and then this:
>
> hda: read_intr: status=0x59 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error
> }
> hda: read_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=19528,
> sector=19528
> end_request: I/O error, dev 03:00 (hda), sector 19528
> dd: writing `/dev/hda': Input/output error
> 19529+0 records in
> 19528+0 records out
> 9998336 bytes transferred in 9.226423 seconds (1083663 bytes/sec)
> too many output retries : Broken pipe
> root@tty1[/]#
>
> comes up on the new pc. Obviously the first thing I did was swap the
> harddrive just in case the one in the new pc is faulty, but I get the
> same error. I also tried to use zcat but no luck.
>
> The docs I've been using can be found at http://wyae.de/docs/img_dd.php
>
> Please let me know if I need to supply more info on this or if there is
> anything I've left out. Thanks for your time and effort in advance!
>
> Thanks
> Dave
--
----------------------------
Giles Nunn - ISP Officer
Carms ICT Development Centre
+44 1267 228277
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