Date: Thu, 6 Jul 1995 23:49:11 -0500 (CDT) From: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com> To: karl@mcs.com (Karl Denninger MCSNet) Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Cloning systems Message-ID: <199507070449.XAA12551@brasil.moneng.mei.com> In-Reply-To: <m0sTzgH-000IDPC@venus.mcs.com> from "Karl Denninger, MCSNet" at Jul 6, 95 05:46:01 pm
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> How are other people doing it? Um, well... I am used to cloning as it is how I have traditionally installed UNIX :-) But with FreeBSD due to the largely nonstandardized nature of storage technologies (i.e. you have several mutant forms of IDE, SCSI with silly geometries on different controllers, etc)... I have generally used sysinstall to install bin/des/krb and maybe some other stuff. Typically I install other distributions later, by hand, with tar. Given a little more disk space - I happen to like the sysinstall based install (well at least mostly), and I would actually *ideally* like to roll a "site standard" distribution that included all my favorite bits, packages, etc., but I haven't done this because I lack the disk space and the time to engineer it. This would be substantially similar to cloning in that it would be cutting all your images from a unified single repository... nice. :-) sysinstall is a necessary evil, I think, to deal with the partitioning and disk issues, though. Currently, I am dealing with ports and stuff by actually loading the entire /usr/ports onto a box and then fudging around to get it to do a make install (it still has the .install_done from previous machine). That's a major strike out for the current ports system - you could not share /usr/ports via NFS, it would seem, for this reason. (anyways - it's been a major annoyance and lately I've started just compiling them all on each box). > The base install package wants to take over, and if you quit, you get nailed > with an immediate reboot. Not good if you want to clone systems. > > I want to be able to clone easily -- I can with BSDI, as their installation > has parts I can run from a shell to do things like partition disks in a > reasonable and easy to use format. FreeBSD appears not to have this as a > possible option. Ummmm, YEAH, that's a really big stumbling block (and really big gripe of mine at this point!)... I *really* think that ANY tool to assist in disk partitioning is very useful - and it pains me to see the current one so tightly integrated into sysinstall. I discovered that I didn't really know how to manually fdisk and partition a disk under the slice system, nd it was a pain to have to putz around with SCSI ID's in order to get sysinstall to do what I wanted - just partition the disk. I think the problem was that I did not know what the NCR810 was translating the geometry as.... but I don't know for sure.... ... Joe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joe Greco - Systems Administrator jgreco@ns.sol.net Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI 414/342-4847
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