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Date:      Tue, 23 Oct 2001 08:25:46 -0600 (MDT)
From:      Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>
To:        Peter Pentchev <roam@ringlet.net>
Cc:        "PSI, Mike Smith" <mlsmith@mitre.org>, <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: Duping a hard disk
Message-ID:  <Pine.LNX.4.33.0110230822010.26349-100000@snaresland.acl.lanl.gov>
In-Reply-To: <20011023154507.A2567@straylight.oblivion.bg>

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On Tue, 23 Oct 2001, Peter Pentchev wrote:
> Is there anything wrong with dd(1)?

A lot.

Best way I found was dump | restore, i.e.
mkfs /dev/newdisk
mount /dev/newdisk /newdisk
dump 0f - / | (cd /newdisk; restore rf -)

or equivalent ...

- yes, you can use tar, but you have to remember all the options
- yes, you can use dd, if you don't mind copying EVERY BLOCK, including
   the ones full of zeros or that are unused
- over the network, you can compress the data

I dup'ed 64 machines this way once over the network and it went FAST.
What we used to do is have a CD boot disk (we built one 128-node cluster
with NO FLOPPIES -- floppies suck). It works well.

Of course with the bproc stuff we are totally out of the disk dup business
for clusters, but for desktops it is nice to be able to slam a cdrom in
and have the machine initialized.

ron


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