Machine Replication

[Mike Tancsa]

At 03:20 PM 21/07/2005, Eli K. Breen wrote:
>All,
>
>Does anyone have a good handle on how to replicate (read: image) a freebsd 
>machine from one machine to an ostensibly similar machine?
>
>So far I've used countless variations and combinations of the following:
>
>dd              (Slow, not usefull if the hardware isn't identical?)
>tar             (Doesn't replicate MBR)
>rsync           (No MBR support)
>Norton Ghost    (Doesn't support UFS/UFS2?)
>G4U             (little experience with this)


g4u is a REALLY nice front end to dd basically, but works very well and is 
reasonably fast.

If you want fast,
dump | restore
as it will only copy data and ignore empty blocks.  You then just need to 
install the MBR which is easy to do via sysinstall if you are not 
comfortable disklabel

e.g.

cd /;dump -C 20 -0f - / | (cd /mnt/root-disk; restore -rf - )
cd /;dump -C 20 -0f - /usr | (cd /mnt/usr-disk; restore -rf - )

and so on.

         ---Mike