New machines - Dump and Restore -deploy

[Mark]

Grant Peel wrote:

> I intend to use Dump and Restore to completely copy the OS from the
> older box to the two new ones.
>
> Before I do this, I have three questions:
>
> The current (older box) has only a 18 GB SATA drive on it. The two new
> machines have 36 GB SCSI drives. So my question is, as long as the
> partitions on the new box are names the same as the old box, and are
> at least the same size, or bigger, dump and restore should work
> without problems (?)

Dump/restore are not partition-bound per se; if you wish to restore your
/usr partition in /var, for instance, restore will not keep you from doing
so (I hope common sense will; but that is a different matter). Restore will
restore in the current directory. So, if you wish to restore your usr
partition, you could do something like this:

newfs /dev/ad0s1e (if that is where your /usr partition resides)
mount /dev/ad0s1e /usr
cd /usr
restore -rf/path-to-file

> I will need to install a base OS on the new systems first, so I can
> partition the drives and be able to connect tot the box, the second
> question is, when I use restore, will it overwrite the kernel, if so,
> can I protect the kernel from being overwritten?

You cannot restore the root-partition on the root-partition that you booted
from, because it is in use at the time. You need to boot from a different
FreeBSD system (or 'fix-it' floppy) to make that happen.

- Mark