Machine Replication

[Scott, Brian]

For what its worth I use Norton Ghost to regularly set up a classroom of
machines with FreeBSD 5.3, mostly because other teachers put Windoze
stuff on the same boxes so the Ghost setup makes sense.

Ghost doesn't understand UFS but doesn't need to. It just takes a block
by block copy of the whole partition. To keep the images a reasonable
size I do a
dd if=/dev/zero bs=1m of=/junk; rm /junk
(repeat for every file system) before imaging and tell ghost to do high
compression. Compressing lots of zeros is really efficient so the images
come out a reasonable size. Using multicasting I can dump the image in
parallel onto 15 machines and have the system installed in under 10
minutes. IP configuration is done with DHCP so thats all
straightforward. I use a small dhcp client hook script to change the
system name based on IP so I even get unique system names

The fact that the hardware on all of the target machines is the same is
obviously a huge benefit because I can use a single X configuration, but
FreeBSD travels to new hardware a lot better than any of the other O/Ss
do. The only real issue is that I have some variety of hard disk types
but providing the original partition isn't bigger than my smallest
target drive, Ghost looks after everything properly.

I haven't found a decent freeware alternative that I could get the same
results from but hope to some day.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-freebsd-stable at freebsd.org
[mailto:owner-freebsd-stable at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Eli K. Breen
Sent: Friday, 22 July 2005 5:21 AM
To: freebsd-stable at freebsd.org
Subject: Machine Replication

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)

Now whether my details are a bit off, that's fine, I don't want this to 
be diluted in to discussion of minute frivolous details (as these things

are wont to do), but what I _am_ looking for is a tried, tested and true

method of FreeBSD machine replication, specifically for the 5.3+
releases.

Many thanks,

-E-
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