Regarding the cloning of physical systems, a while back Andrew Brown
contributed a live image that would clone (a bit slowly) a physical
system using cobbler to network
deploy the clone image. I think it might be interesting to try to
resurrect and supercharge that idea. This way we could be sure to
deploy
Windows systems
that /also/ had their software installed, without having to also teach
Cobbler about Windows domain automation. We say Clonezilla and other
analogs is hard to deploy,
why not write a better solution?
We're in the process of getting clonezilla up & running. We've added
it to cobbler as a distro, without any real issues, and are actually
intending to use to for RHEL based systems, vs windows. We have a few
Oracle RAC servers, and they're all identical to each other except for
the host name, and a few settings that the DBA's need to adjust.
It'll be much faster than using a kickstart to build the system, in
our case.
We also made the Windows team in the office (vs the datacenter)
happy, by allowing them to use the pxe to pull up clonezilla. They
can reimage a machine without even moving it.
I'm not sure of what the issue was with clonezilla in the past, but it
seems pretty straight forward to us.
Having said that - it *really* doesn't like booting with the fiber
cards we have on our hardware, so.. i'll be looking into the live
image for cloning. Maybe that works :-)
Matthew
------------------
Matthew Barr
InteractiveOne - Senior System Engineer
e:mbarr@interactiveone.com