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Date:      Tue, 23 Oct 2001 09:08:11 -0400
From:      Michael Sinz <msinz@wgate.com>
To:        "PSI, Mike Smith" <mlsmith@mitre.org>, hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Duping a hard disk
Message-ID:  <00007e230281ca07d1@[192.168.1.4]>
References:  <00007da502814c07d1@[192.168.1.4]>

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"PSI, Mike Smith" wrote:
> 
> I am running a lab with 43 FreeBDS machines and will be adding about 20
> more in the near future. ALL these machines are absolutely identical
> except for IP address and machine name. To speed up the adding of new
> machines, I envision making a duplication station, where I would add a
> "new" disk as a slave and then dup the master disk to the slave disk.
> Then I would only have to change IP and machine name.
> 
> But alas, I cannot find any procedures for doing this. Does anyone know
> how to duplicate a master disk to a "new" slave disk??? It would REALLY
> make my life much easier.

Well, if everything is LBA addressed, you can do a dd from the source
disk to the target disk.  However, with CHS you can not do that so easily
if the drives are not the exact same (at least in size if not also in
model)

We used to do this here for our machines (over 500 in the lab) but I built
a tool that would take a disk and make a compressed CD image of it and then
be able to restore that onto a disk even if the disk is a different size.
The tool requires at least FreeBSD 4.2 but the disks it can make work even
with FreeBSD 2.2.x (which some of our platforms are)

I should, at some point, release this.  However, it is very rough and
somewhat specific to our needs.

-- 
Michael Sinz ---- Worldgate Communications ---- msinz@wgate.com
A master's secrets are only as good as
	the master's ability to explain them to others.

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