Date: Tue, 9 Apr 1996 16:21:15 -0400 From: "Steven D. Arnold" <yami@digex.net> To: questions@freebsd.org Cc: disc@digex.net Subject: rdisting a lab of FreeBSD machines Message-ID: <9604091621.AA15091@digex.net>
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Hi, I have a lab of FreeBSD machines we use for classes here. I want to create a master installation and have a method to quickly and automatically restore all the machines to an initial condition. The problem with rdist is that we can't simply rdist everything all at once on the entire filesystem -- I suspect overwriting /etc, /dev or the kernel could cause problems. ;) Another possibility -- create a bootable floppy with a small kernel, a Bourne shell and a script that NFS mounts some filesystems and copies over their contents to the local hard disks. The problem with this is that I am having a very hard time getting a floppy disk to be big enough to hold a kernel plus a Bourne shell. The FreeBSD minimal kernel is 1,085,639 bytes and the shell is about 300K. Ought to be small enough for a 1440K floppy, you say. But when I make a disk with the following commands: fdformat -f 1440 fd0.1440 disklabel -w /dev/fd0.1440 fd1440 newfs -m 0 /dev/fd0.1440 ...it turns out to only be ~880K. Out of desperation, I tried formatting the floppy with the above commands, except I used the 1720K configuration instead of the 1440. I ended up with a disk capable of holding 1137K -- still not enough. The idea of netbooting also occured to me, but it seems to require just as many resources on a floppy as the second plan. Basically, all I need is a solution for restoring these FreeBSD machines to a known configuration. Preferably in the end it will only involve me running a script and/or inserting a floppy in the drives of each machine, allowing the machine to then restore itself. Any ideas? Anyone else on this list faced a similar situation? Please respond to me directly. Thanks! -------------------------------------------------------------- Steven D. Arnold yami@digex.net "Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself." --Weiler's Law http://phear.digex.net/liberoz.html My PGP public key: http://phear.digex.net/thoth/pgp.html
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