Falko Timme wrote a tutorial describing how to create images of your Linux system with SystemImager. SystemImager lets you create images of your installations. So you can make a backup of your systems, clone your systems (if you have to maintain more than one machine with exactly the same software), or even distribute your software over the internet. To do so, you need an image server (should have enough disk space to store your images) and a so-called golden client (i.e., your “perfect system” of which you want to make an image).
HOWTO: Creating Images Of Your Linux System With SystemImager
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Eugenia Loli
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How useful would this be when the hardware can vary from installation to installation? Even in small offices, people don’t always have the same PC. Wouldn’t the kernel have to be modified on a per basis? I’m probably out of touch here..
What’s the difference with partimage http://www.partimage.org/
? Isn’t partimage better ?
How useful would this be when the hardware can vary from installation to installation?
It’d take some wrangling, but I think something like Fedora would just detect the new hardware and try to deal with it. If you did build a custom kernel, you might have to play. Of course, your best bet would be to create a kernel on the ‘gold’ computer with as many drivers as you need for all the computer in the office, so they’d be available for whatever computer it ends up in.
I recently had to install a dual boot system (fc3/winxp) on 40 brand new computers in a campus lab, and ghost failed on the linux partition.
The program G4U ( http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/ ) really saved my butt and is quite simple, compression enabled by default got my 80 gig hard drive down to just under 6 gigs. The “image server” is just any ftp server you choose and it was quite simple to use. I would reccomend it to anyone who has a similar setup or if ghost has failed you.
I was looking into disk cloning when I set up an Arch Linux system for my sister last spring, but then rather to cd or dvd.
The idea was that if something really got messed up, she should just be able to boot from the cd/dvd, and hit enter to confirm that she wants to overwrite the disc with the image I made before handing over the computer.
There are some solutions like that out there (Free/for *nix, did not check out Ghost), but sadly no easy click-and-go software.
What’s wrong with dd?
From what I’ve heard, mondo should be what you need. Its a backup program that can burn complete installations to (multiple) bootable CD. Restoring from this CD is said to be very easy, while the backup procedure is surely not click-and-go.
Haven’t tried it myself yet, though.
I used SI a lot at my last job, it was for automated installs of dozens of Epias. As those things boot off the network all you had to do to install a machine was turn on network booting in the BIOS and reboot. An hour later it was installed, no human intervention needed. For new machines I had to add each to the SI configs so that it knew what image to serve it. Very handy and quite easy to understand too.
We also hacked SI a bit and did DVD-installs for systems that were not on the same network. Required some work, but it also worked beautifully. Just pop in the DVD, boot, wait an hour and it was done.