Advice for dump/restore over SSH

[Clifton Royston]

On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 12:34:26PM -0500, FreeBSD wrote:
> I'm having difficulties trying to clone a FreeBSD 7.1 PC to another 
> exact same PC over SSH.
> 
> There is my the things I tried:
> 
> I found that link http://devpit.org/wiki/Dump_and_Restore_over_SSH which 
> seemed exactly what I wanted. The problem is that FreeSBIE is not 
> working on this PC (Dell Vostro 220 Slim). It seems to be a problem with 
> the disk controler (can't mount the / partition).
> 
> So, I decided to install a minimal FreeBSD 7.1 on the PC to be cloned. 
> I'm trying to dump/restore the /usr partition but I got warnings with 
> the files already being present and it finally crashed SSHd just after 
> transfering /usr/lib/libssl.so. After that, there is nothing to do with 
> the PC, SSHd refuse to restart (segmentation fault).

It sounds like you're trying to restore onto the non-empty /usr
partition while running programs from that partition.  I don't think
that is ever likely to work, and I'm not surprised that your sshd
crashes and won't restart when you've replaced some-but-not-all of its
files.

You should restore non-incremental dump backups onto a file system made
freshly empty with newfs, which you can do if you bring the system up
in single-user mode or boot it from other media like a live CD.  This
is why the FreeSBIE CD is an essential part of the plan at the link you
posted.

You will probably have to start again from scratch on the PC you're
cloning onto; find some media you can boot it from, or install it to
where you can bring it up in single-user and run some listener which is
simpler than sshd.
  -- Clifton

-- 
    Clifton Royston  --  cliftonr at iandicomputing.com / cliftonr at lava.net
       President  - I and I Computing * http://www.iandicomputing.com/
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