cloning Linux over TCP/IP - lowtec approach needed

T

Thuleman

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Apr 13, 2004
Messages
5,833
Folks, I have been battling with DRBL and CloneZilla last night and also just had a look at Ghost 11 and I am having a bit of trouble to set this up.

What I need to do is to create a clone image of a Fedora box over TCP/IP using the least complex solution. This process will be done once a month, and it is understood that the Fedora box needs to be booted with either a physical media (CD/DVD/USB stick) or some network boot. The destination can be either Linux or Windows, it doesn't matter, in fact, Windows would be preferred.

It's a single machine with a single image cycle per month. There ought to be some low-tech solution to get this done without to run DRBL or TFTP servers, no?

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.
 
netcat and dd will be your friend.
I have send a 7Gig partition to a mate in london this way
 
If you want a Windows solution, you could build a PE disk that creates an imaging using IMAGEX from WAIK and push that out to a mounted drive.

If you wanted a linux solution you could use Partition Image. They have a boot disk to boot with and you could mount an SMB share to save the image off to.

Either option could be scripted and shouldn't be that hard to implement.
 
If you're going do dd|gzip before hand its best to mount partition and fill any empty space with a big file of zeros, eg 'dd if=/dev/zero of=zeros bs=1M', it'll let you compress the crap outa the drive.
Also this is sorta old school crap.

You want to do things oddly for some reason? Probably be easier backup the files instead of partition, and then if u really care just use dd to backup boot block. You could probably write some easy script to backup your sytem while its running.
 
Thanks for the suggestions thus far, much appreciated.

What's really needed is a no-brainer way to create an image, and then restore that image if needed. The Ghost version this place has requires a TFTP server which is already too complex. Essentially it comes down to being able to restore the box to the previous condition by just booting it up, and restoring the image via ethernet from a different box.

dd & netcat seems like the way to go from what I have read up on thus far, the reason for *oddity* is simplicity without having to spend cash to purchase anything.
 
Another option would be CloneZilla Live => network share or usb drive. Give it a shot! :)
 
You could install a second mini-OS on a separate partition that you could boot into rather than having to deal with removable media.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top