From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Oct 4 7:33:33 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 56B4837B401 for ; Fri, 4 Oct 2002 07:33:32 -0700 (PDT) Received: from dan.emsphone.com (dan.emsphone.com [199.67.51.101]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D520D43E7B for ; Fri, 4 Oct 2002 07:33:31 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dan@dan.emsphone.com) Received: (from dan@localhost) by dan.emsphone.com (8.12.6/8.12.5) id g94EXSRj056201; Fri, 4 Oct 2002 09:33:28 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from dan) Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2002 09:33:28 -0500 From: Dan Nelson To: "Jacob S. Barrett" Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Block Zeroing Tool Message-ID: <20021004143328.GC21868@dan.emsphone.com> References: <3D9DA621.2080201@amduat.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <3D9DA621.2080201@amduat.net> X-OS: FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT X-message-flag: Outlook Error User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.1i Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In the last episode (Oct 04), Jacob S. Barrett said: > Is there a tool for FreeBSD that zeros the unallocated blocks on a > filesystem? > > The company I work for has an image on demand system for our lab > machines. This system relies on ghost which only supports file by > file imaging on certain file systems. I want to take disk images of > certain FreeBSD installations. Ghost will only take sector by sector > images of FreeBSD partitions. Since it is doing this it stores all > the "junk" unused blocks as well. This makes for a very large image > even with high compression. If I can zero out the unused blocks > before taking the image with high compression the image size should > be much smaller. > > So, is there utility to zero out those blocks? Does this make sense? > Is there a better way to take images of FreeBSD machines? dd if=/dev/zero of=filler bs=1m ; rm filler -- Dan Nelson dnelson@allantgroup.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message