Date: Tue, 24 Feb 1998 17:14:53 -0800 From: Greg Shenaut <greg@bogslab.ucdavis.edu> To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: roll-in installation? Message-ID: <199802250115.RAA09958@myrtle1.bogs.org> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 25 Feb 1998 11:04:05 %2B1030." <19980225110405.40141@freebie.lemis.com>
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In message <19980225110405.40141@freebie.lemis.com>, Greg Lehey cleopede: >On Mon, 23 February 1998 at 14:14:48 -0800, Greg Shenaut wrote: >> Is there a mechanism already in place which would allow a hands-off >> roll-in installation from SCSI tape of a FreeBSD distribution onto >> a virgin machine? > >What I've done is to make one installation, copy a disk image to tape, >and then restore it to other disks, thus creating a complete clone of >the first machine. This sounds like it would fit your bill. Yes, I thought of this, but hadn't tried it because I have no tape drive which can hold a whole disk image. Maybe I should just go out and buy one, but I am exploring trying to zero all free blocks to reduce random bytes and then writing out the image using a compression filter. BTW, in an earlier message I asked whether there was any way to zero all the free blocks in a file system, and, just minutes after sending the message, I realized that a three or four line C program which opens a file for writing, writes zeroes to it until a write error occurs, then unlinks it, should do the trick. In fact, "dd if=/dev/zero of=foobar bs=32k ; rm foobar" would be even easier. Then, just follow this with "dd if=/dev/rXd0 | compress -c > /dev/rst0" or whatever. -Greg To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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