On 10/29/18 11:31 AM, Danishka Navin wrote:
> Hi,
> I have to prepare hundreds of USB sticks which need to either papre as a
> liveUSB or make it as a installed system (using the USB as the storage
> when installing fedora).
You can install to a USB stick if you want. Generally, Linux running on
any sort of a USB drive is quite slow, so keep that in mind.
Yes, I know but this is to avoid misconfiguration of over 1000 servers across the country within a small window with less technical people in remote areas.
You could then clone the USB stick to other USB sticks via "dd" using
the raw, block devices. Assuming /dev/sdb is the drive you installed to
and /dev/sdc is the intended target:
dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc bs=4k,sync
You could also make an image of the stick on hard drive using dd:
dd if=/dev/sdb of=/somefilename.img bs=4k,sync
this means once installed ISO in to USB (completion of anaconda and post installation) create an .img ?
then, if you have multiple USB ports (or a big hub), you could run
parallel "dd"s specifying different sticks as targets:
screen 'dd if=/somefilename.img of=/dev/sdc bs=4k,sync'
screen 'dd if=/somefilename.img of=/dev/sdd bs=4k,sync'
...
screen 'dd if=/somefilename.img of=/dev/sdX bs=4k,sync'
which would run all of the dd commands in parallel screen sessions.
Sort of a poor man's bulk disk duplicator. I'd highly recommend that
you use USB3 if possible if you're feeding a hub to minimize the I/O
contention you'll get.
You could do something similar if all you wanted to do was put the
LiveUSB ISO image on the sticks (replace "/somefilename.img" with the
path to the ISO image you're interested in).
Be aware that generally writing to USB can be a pokey process
(especially if everything's on the same USB host port, USB3 or not), but
you get the general idea.
Thanks again!