Creating Linux Images For Transfer To Similar Hardware 1

[itsp1965]

Hello folks, I have been tasked with creating a RHEL4 image which will be deployed on about a dozen systems all with similar hardware. My customer wants to manually install on each of the systems, but I am afraid that they are bound to miss something during the course of each install.
I have heard that you can create images using the 'dd' command but I haven't any real good tutorials (ie from stepA to stepZ) that will allow me to create the image, create a dd image and then deploy it on new hardware
Does anyone have any experience with this? I don't have much time for testing and any guidance would be appreciated. Thank you.

 

[zeland]

You could opt for using a scripted install via kickstart.

--== Anything can go wrong. It's just a matter of how far wrong it will go till people think its right. ==--

 

[itsp1965]

Do you have any good sites that describes the process? Thanks.

 

[zeland]

My baby steps into kickstart started from here.

--== Anything can go wrong. It's just a matter of how far wrong it will go till people think its right. ==--

 

[itsp1965]

Thanks Zeland, I thought of RTFM.. and proceeded to take a gander at the Redhat Sysadmin manual. Looks pretty straight forward.

 

[zeland]

On Fedora, after doing a regular install, you can find a file called anaconda-ks.cfg in the /root directory. This is actually a kickstart file that you can use to duplicate that installation on another machine.

--== Anything can go wrong. It's just a matter of how far wrong it will go till people think its right. ==--

 

[jstreich]

If it was debian based instead of RHEL based, the process could be done quite easily.

For that matter, you may beable to use debootstrap if you debianize your RHEL packages, but that would take a long time to get right.

Kickstart is your best bet, but may require you to make a few custom rpm files...

Otherwise Symantic Ghost works in RAW mode for Linux, G4L/G4U works and there is always network versions of dd.



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[zeland]

My gripe with Ghost/G4L/G4U/dd is that there you still need some boot media to startup your machine and fiddle with settings. I guess its fine with just 1 or 2 machines, but once you start doing 20 or more machines with just 1 or 2 pieces of boot media, hopping from one place to another... arrrgh!

F7 has a PXE boot image you can use to bootstrap your computer off the network. Now I go for my cup of tea and comeback 30 minutes later to a room full of freshly install machines.

--== Anything can go wrong. It's just a matter of how far wrong it will go till people think its right. ==--

 

[thedaver]

zeland, Floppies not good enough for ya? ;-) You can use the hole punch and "double side" 'em!

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[aixmurderer]

Worth while looking at "remasterme" if you can find a package for your distro.

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[zeland]

A box of 10 floppies cost more than a box of 10 CDs. Besides, most newer systems don't come with floppy drives anymore.

--== Anything can go wrong. It's just a matter of how far wrong it will go till people think its right. ==--

 

[jgunkel]

Issues with dd, etc:

When you clone the disk(s) with dd, you will be copying the md signatures, (if you are doing raid) LVM PV sigs, etc. Restoring these to similar hardware will not be too big a deal (minor stuff to fix, like network interfaces tied to MAC address, etc.) but $DEIETY help you if you need to mount one of those meta devices on another system (for recovery/expansion/upgrade/whatever) that already has one of those cloned devices present.

A better idea, as a couple people mentioned, is kickstart. I highly recommend this avenue. Set up a tftp and dhcp server in your environment, and you can PXE boot the farm to install without physical install media in the box. (sounds like this might be one of your requirements.) Even if you don't use kickstart to do the actual install, consider using it to create a "skeleton" system, with proper UUIDs on all the disks, etc. then just use tar to copy the original system over the new install. You will still have to deal with hostnames, network config, etc. though.

And now the kicker. You can automate this whole procedure with a tool called cobbler. From any recent yum-equipped distro, type in "yum install cobbler" and then cobbler, with all it's dependencies, will be automagically installed to that machine. Mount your install media, patches, custom RPMS, etc. where apache can find it, and start kickstarting.

For what it's worth, IAARHCE. I have this setup on my laptop, (along with iso's of all the install media I need) and can bring up a new box from bare metal in about 15 minutes. It's a whole lot better than swapping CDs.

Cheers!