From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Dec 10 23:13:20 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from andrsn.stanford.edu (andrsn.Stanford.EDU [171.66.112.163]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CDD2837B416 for ; Mon, 10 Dec 2001 23:13:16 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (andrsn@localhost.stanford.edu [127.0.0.1]) by andrsn.stanford.edu (8.9.3/8.9.1) with ESMTP id XAA93666; Mon, 10 Dec 2001 23:05:39 -0800 (PST) Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2001 23:05:39 -0800 (PST) From: Annelise Anderson To: Darryl Hoar Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Copy a running system In-Reply-To: <001401c181bb$58090c60$0701a8c0@darryl> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Mon, 10 Dec 2001, Darryl Hoar wrote: > Greetings, > I tediously setup a 4.4-stable box as > a firewall/router, etc. I have it just > the way I want it. I have two other boxes > a little different hardware) and was wondering > if I could copy the setup from my running firewall > to the other two boxes, then just tweak the differences? > This would save a BOATLOAD of time. > My inclination would be to install a basic system on the new machine(s) and then use either rsync (needs to be installed and on both machines). However, rsync doesn't do hard links, and the syntax is tricky (you could delete the files on the source machine if you get it wrong). The nice part about rsync is that it works across a network. You can, however, exclude files. Alternatively, and probably better, are dump and restore. I think you'd have to dump to a file, move the files to which you dump, and restore them. In either case, you'll get the /etc files from the original machine, and /etc/fstab especially may be incorrect; you might want to back it up first. Other config files will also be overwritten, like /etc/rc.conf, unless you are successful with exluding files using rsync. Annelise -- Annelise Anderson Author of: FreeBSD: An Open-Source Operating System for Your PC Available from: BSDmall.com and amazon.com Book Website: http://www.bittreepress.com/FreeBSD/introbook/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message