Re: duplicating setup machine
On Mon, 23 Oct 2000, John Chambers wrote:
> What are the easy ways to duplicate an existing
> setup debian machine to other machines?
There are (as usual with Linux) a number of different ways to do this. One
quick and dirty way that I like is to boot off of something like Tomsrtbt
floppy or Linuxcare's Bootable Business Card. You can download the ISO for
the BBC at:
www.linuxcare.com/bootable_cd
The bootable business card (which can be burned into one of those business
card sized CDRs) is a pretty decent rescue disk. It isn't perfect, but it
has many of the commands that you'd want on such a beast.
You can burn a copy of the BBC, boot off of it, start up networking
(trivial-network-setup I think - just type trivial and hit tab - ahh, a
real shell!) - which will ask you if you want to obtain an IP address via
DHCP. It also prompts you whether you want to install ssh (which it gets
remotely via wget).
You are in a perfect situation to partition the local hard drive (take
your pick: cfdisk, fdisk or sfdisk). sfdisk is great for automating
partitioning (you pass start cylinder, number of cylinders, type (L -
linux, S - swap, etc). Definitely do a man sfdisk on a real system first
(BBC does not have man pages AFAIK).
Then, once your partitioning is as you like it, you can use something like
rsync to replicate from another machine. Or in a much simplier fashion you
can use something like tar or cpio via ssh.
Although the dpkg --get/set-selections is awesome, you don't get all the
other things you need to set up in order to have a working system. FYI, if
you do transfer the entire machine using tar or cpio make sure you do an
apt-get clean to clean out the local copy of the retrieved .deb files -
otherwise you'll be copying quite a bit more than you may expect.
If you want/need more details, feel free to contact me.
---
dennis@illusions.com
dennis@opnix.com
OpNIX - Simply geek tested, mother approved bandwidth
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