Posted by Wim Koorenneef on 2006-11-04 19:56 CET
My employer replaced a bunch of old Compaq ENS pentium III 1000Mhz pc's with new ones. Usually these old pc's are offered to employees without an operating system for a small fee. Not a very attractive offer if you ask me, so i decided to install Ubuntu Edge Eft on all of them. But how do you clone one pc into thirty or so more? Partimage to the rescue!
First i installed Edgy Eft on the master pc. I also installed automatix2 and a bunch of extra packages like inkscape and scribus. I changed /etc/fstab so that the device files are used instead of the UUID (these change when you make new partitions). Then i installed the partimage package on the master and on my server. For some reason i was unable to let the master partimage talk to the server partimaged. Something to do with authentication. Because security on my internal network isn't an issue i installed the static binaries from the Partimage site on my server and booted the client with SystemResueCD.
I decided that all pc's would have a 500MB swap partition on /dev/hda1 and a large ext3 partition on /dev/hda2 (9.5GB on the master pc). Here's what i did next.
On the server i stopped (as root) the Ubuntu version of partimaged and started the static binary version in partimaged in my home directory:
/etc/init.d/partimaged stop
cd ~
./partimage
On the master pc i booted SystemResueCD and started partimage. wildcat is the name of my server:
partimage -s wildcat save /dev/hda2 edgy
It took a little over 15 minutes to copy and compress 2.2GB of data to the server. Next i replaced the harddisk in the master pc for a new one, booted the SystemResueCD again, deleted all partitions with cfdisk and made a 500MB swap partition on /dev/hda1 and a large ext3 partition on /dev/hda2 (10GB). Now it is time prepare the swap partition to restore the data.
mkswap -c /dev/hda1
partimage -s wildcat restore /dev/hda2 edgy.000
This took a little under 4 minutes. Impressive! In order to boot the new harddisk i degraded the /dev/hda2 partition from ext3 to ext2, did a file system check, resized the partition and upgraded to ext3 again and installed grub:
tune2fs -O ˆhas_journal /dev/hda2
e2fsck -f -y /dev/hda2
resize2fs -p /dev/hda2
tune2fs -j /dev/hda2
grub
root (hd0,1)
setup (hd0)
quit
And voila! A new Ubuntu Edgy Eft pc is born. Making the next clone should be possible well within 10 minutes. Another 28 to go :-)
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