[KLUG Members] Re: drive ghosting -- Unlike Windows, Linux doesn't need utilities

[Bryan J. Smith]

Rusty Yonkers wrote:
> We are using Ghost to save images of configurations
> that we use in class.  It is working fine with Windows
> software but we are having loads of problems with
> Linux.  Sometimes we can just do a fsck to fix the
> problem but other times we get kernel panics at boot
> etc and this is causing great consternation.  Does
> anyone know of a better solution?  We are using Ghost
> 2000 currently.  Has anyone used the newest versions
> of Ghost on Linux?
> I am going slowly insane from this problem.

Because Linux does not have the "live registry" and issues with NT
such as SIDs (security identifiers) and bootstrap copying, you can
easily clone live Linux filesystems to other systems with the
_built-in_ Linux utilities.

I do this all the time using an NFS server (or directly to another
HD/system itself via local/NFS), and find|cpio** to copy, and an NFS
boot floppy (RedHat's "bootnet" disk works nicely) and find|cpio**
again.  After you are done, all that is left is to "chroot /newroot"
and rerun LILO to install the bootstrap.

There are several Linux cloning projects with "broadcast install"
capability.

-- Bryan

** find|cpio = (for both operations, or direct)
  cd /srcfs
  find . -depth -mount -print | cpio -pmdv /dstfs
  [ Repeat for each /srcfs (source filesystem) ]

If you want to compressed store of the filesystems, use the "afio"
command.  It allows per-file compression, which is much more
preferrable (from a recovery standpoint) than a compressed cpio or
tar archive.

Source:
  cd /srcfs
  find . -depth -mount -print | afio -ovZ /dstfs/srcfs.afio

Extract:
  cd /newfs
  afio -ivZ /dstfs/srcfs.afio

If you want a real-time compression program (at the expense of some
compression), check out the LZO algorithm/library and its associated
LZOP program.  It'll give you 3-5x the speed of Gzip (usually faster
than non-compressed cpio/tar "raw") and 8-15x BZip2, for a loss of
10-15%/15-25% in compression ratio, respectively.  To use it with
afio, use the "-P lzop" option:

  ... afio -ovZP lzop /dstfs/srcfs.afio ...

You'll find both afio and lzo on Freshmeat.NET.

-- 
Bryan J. Smith, Engineer        mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org   
AbsoluteValue Systems, Inc.     http://www.linux-wlan.org
SmithConcepts, Inc.          http://www.SmithConcepts.com
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