What is some good & free disk cloning over a network software?
June 15, 2007 12:15 PM Subscribe
Hard disk cloning over a network: Does anyone know of any free, lightweight software that will allow me to distribute a disk image across a network to a bunch of machines?
I have a bunch of machines with the same hardware and I have perfected a linux install on one of them. Now I want to clone the drive of this perfect machine to the rest of the machines.
I know about Ghost for Unix, but I want something that won't use an intermediary ftp server.
In the past, I remember using a piece of software that would boot the machine to be cloned from a bootable CD and set it up as a server. Then you could use the same CD on the machines to receive the image and boot it as a client to receive the image. For the life of me I can't remember the name of this software, nor can I find it again. It was not UDPcast, which should do the job I want but won't recognize my SATA drive out of the box.
So before I do a custom kernel for UDPcast, does anyone have any suggestions?
I have a bunch of machines with the same hardware and I have perfected a linux install on one of them. Now I want to clone the drive of this perfect machine to the rest of the machines.
I know about Ghost for Unix, but I want something that won't use an intermediary ftp server.
In the past, I remember using a piece of software that would boot the machine to be cloned from a bootable CD and set it up as a server. Then you could use the same CD on the machines to receive the image and boot it as a client to receive the image. For the life of me I can't remember the name of this software, nor can I find it again. It was not UDPcast, which should do the job I want but won't recognize my SATA drive out of the box.
So before I do a custom kernel for UDPcast, does anyone have any suggestions?
a linux rescue CD with DD and netcat?
posted by Geckwoistmeinauto at 1:57 PM on June 15, 2007
posted by Geckwoistmeinauto at 1:57 PM on June 15, 2007
I do it with knoppix or DSL cds using dd over ssh:
From the host/main machine:
# dd if=/dev/hda | ssh target.ip.add.ress dd of=/dev/hda
Or you can do it with dd & netcat
posted by jbroome at 1:59 PM on June 15, 2007
From the host/main machine:
# dd if=/dev/hda | ssh target.ip.add.ress dd of=/dev/hda
Or you can do it with dd & netcat
posted by jbroome at 1:59 PM on June 15, 2007
If you really want to clone the whole disk, boot,partition and the whole thing... dd would work fine, and whatever local tools you have, fsdump and what not.
But generally, at work, I always use rsync. It will only copy the used data (dd will do the zeros too) and can be run incrementally as many times as you want, also over ssh.
But you'd have to do the boot/partition separately. (and I'd probably just dd the first 16 or so blocks).
posted by lundman at 11:24 PM on June 15, 2007
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by jammnrose at 12:25 PM on June 15, 2007