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Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2005 15:37:13 -0400
To: "Eli K. Breen" <bsd@unixforge.net>, freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
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Subject: Re: Machine Replication
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At 15:20 7/21/2005, Eli K. Breen wrote:
>All,
>
>Does anyone have a good handle on how to replicate (read: image) a freebsd 
>machine from one machine to an ostensibly similar machine?
>
>So far I've used countless variations and combinations of the following:
>
>dd    (Slow, not usefull if the hardware isn't identical?)
>tar   (Doesn't replicate MBR)
>rsync   (No MBR support)
>Norton Ghost  (Doesn't support UFS/UFS2?)
>G4U   (little experience with this)

I've found a combination of dd + tar works great, as documented.

Stick the new drive in the box to be duplicated, use dd on the first 
(forget how many) sectors to copy the mbr and partition tables over, then 
use a tar pipe to copy from one drive to the other, preserving all perms 
and so forth.

Barring that, commercial single-disk duplicators aren't THAT 
expensive.  Hell you could just use a cheap raid card to raid-1 mirror the 
drive, then yank it out and toss it in another box, which I've done on 
occasion when pressed.