tar FBSD disk clone

David Kelly dkelly at HiWAAY.net
Sat Apr 26 11:28:33 PDT 2003


On Saturday 26 April 2003 08:00 am, Steve Bertrand wrote:
> >
> > Read the disklabel(8) man page, specifically "Installing
> > bootstraps". I think you need to "disklabel -B ad0s1" (use the
> > appropriate disk device and slice).
>
> As a matter of fact, I used #/stand/sysinstall to create my partition
> on the disk, and I just used the 's' option to make it bootable. Then
> I read the disklabel(8) man page, and found out how simple it really
> was to use. I did not use the -B option, becuase I already made the
> disk bootable with sysinstall.
>
> After I cut up the slice using disklabel, I did a #newfs ad0s1x to
> all new areas, extracted the tar's onto the new disk, pulled the disk
> out and put it into a new machine and away it went!
>
> I have since done the same procedure (cloning an entire production
> box) without taking the original box offline!
>
> Works great!

tar does not replicate the extra flags unique to BSD UFS.

This will create an mtree template noting each files flags:
# mtree -c -k flags -p / > flags.mtree

Haven't tried it but believe this will hammer the above flags back onto 
your restored-from-tar system:

# mtree -eUf flags.mtree -p /

Ideally one would wish to trim the flags.mtree file down to only those 
files with bits set in their flags. Offhand I don't know an easy way to 
do that. Critical secruity related files will have "flags=schg" beside 
them in the above flags.mtree.

-- 
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly at hiwaay.net
=====================================================================
The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its
capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system.


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