On Mon, 23 Oct 2000, John Chambers wrote: > What are the easy ways to duplicate an existing > setup debian machine to other machines?
There are (as usual with Linux) a number of different ways to do this. One quick and dirty way that I like is to boot off of something like Tomsrtbt floppy or Linuxcare's Bootable Business Card. You can download the ISO for the BBC at: www.linuxcare.com/bootable_cd The bootable business card (which can be burned into one of those business card sized CDRs) is a pretty decent rescue disk. It isn't perfect, but it has many of the commands that you'd want on such a beast. You can burn a copy of the BBC, boot off of it, start up networking (trivial-network-setup I think - just type trivial and hit tab - ahh, a real shell!) - which will ask you if you want to obtain an IP address via DHCP. It also prompts you whether you want to install ssh (which it gets remotely via wget). You are in a perfect situation to partition the local hard drive (take your pick: cfdisk, fdisk or sfdisk). sfdisk is great for automating partitioning (you pass start cylinder, number of cylinders, type (L - linux, S - swap, etc). Definitely do a man sfdisk on a real system first (BBC does not have man pages AFAIK). Then, once your partitioning is as you like it, you can use something like rsync to replicate from another machine. Or in a much simplier fashion you can use something like tar or cpio via ssh. Although the dpkg --get/set-selections is awesome, you don't get all the other things you need to set up in order to have a working system. FYI, if you do transfer the entire machine using tar or cpio make sure you do an apt-get clean to clean out the local copy of the retrieved .deb files - otherwise you'll be copying quite a bit more than you may expect. If you want/need more details, feel free to contact me. --- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] OpNIX - Simply geek tested, mother approved bandwidth
