Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Thu, 24 Feb 2000 20:21:15 +1100
From:      Warren Welch <wwlists@intraceptives.com.au>
To:        "Michael R. Wayne" <wayne@staff.msen.com>, freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: CD backup of client "appliances"?
Message-ID:  <4.2.1.20000224200714.056e79d0@arthur.intraceptives.com.au>
In-Reply-To: <200002240602.BAA67759@manor.msen.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
At 01:02 AM 2/24/00 -0500, Michael R. Wayne wrote:

>We've been setting up FreeBSD boxes for clients to do some combination
>of squid, email, firewalling as well as some custom services.  We
>KNOW that these clients will never do proper backups.  Ideally,
>we'd like to take a completely configured box and build a CD which
>would contain a script which, when run, would partition a new disk
>to be exactly the same as what we laid down on this one (even if
>the new one is much larger) and do restores of each of the filesystems.
>The clients get to lose on their data, we just want a fast restore.
>We'd tape the CD to the inside of the box until they call us in
>panic mode.
>
>This seems fairly atraightforward, I dug through ports but did not locate
>such a beaast.  Anyone got any leads?

I've been "toying" with this idea myself, for some time...  I considered 
using NORTON Ghost (as mentioned in another post), but it's got a problem 
in that it won't expand the partitions to fit the disk (it doesn't 
understand UNIX filesystems)...

One thing I've done, is to take a dump of each of the major filesystems 
that I need (/, /usr, /var, /squid, and any others you might consider), and 
dump them & compress (gzip) them to a file.  I can then use restore to 
re-create the FS.  An alternative is to create a compressed tar archive, 
and place that on the CD.  All the above is possible.

What I need / want, is a way to partion and label the disk, in such away 
that I can say "if the HD is greater than 1Gb, then create / partition at 
10% overall disk space, otherwise create / at 25Mb", etc. all from a set of 
scripts.

And of course this has to be a bootable CD with just the above scripts, and 
archives.  Been toying with the idea of PicoBSD to do the bootable part, 
and put the utils on that are needed...  TIME, that's what I need...

If anyone else has any ideas, I'd appreciate hearing them too.

Thanks,

Warren
wwelch@intraceptives.com.au



To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?4.2.1.20000224200714.056e79d0>