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Re: Is there a Linux ghost?



On Wed, 5 Sep 2001, Nadav Har'El wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 05, 2001, Ori Hanegby wrote about "RE: Is there a Linux ghost?":
> > hi
> > 
> > the "dd" command can give u the functionality u would like, by using the
> > input/ouput file as the disk/partition u would like to duplicate.
> > for example:
> > dd if=<hard disk image backup file> of=/dev/hda bs=300k

The original question was about copying those images to blank systems. So
you first hove to somehow connect to the server.

This can be done via NFS/SMB if you can create a floppy that contains
a client for one.

Or you can try to connect from the client to the server via ssh/rsh (or
maybe even simply using netcat) and pipe the image file directly to dd . 

> 
> But watch out - this can be S-L-O-W for the huge disks (20GB) of today...
> Just think about it - if it can copy (read and then write) 5MB a second (I'm
> just making up a number) it will take over an hour to copy 20GB...

Is this image expected to be filled with "blanks" and compress well? If
so, put gzip/bzip2 somewhere in the pipe.

Dislaimer: never tried it.

> 
> Usually, much of the disk doesn't need to be copied: only about 2GB will
> contain prebundled software (hopefully a Linux system!!), and the rest
> can be generated again and again by "mkfs"ing empty file systems, "mkswap"ing
> swap partitions, and so on. It's easy to copy only one partition, by copying
> /dev/hda1 (for example), not the whole /dev/hda. Of course, you'll need to
> copy the partition table first - I recommend sfdisk(8).

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:tzafrir@technion.ac.il
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir


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