My ongoing project has been a learning experience for me. One of the areas I’ve played in more than a few times is building installers for Linux but this time I wanted to create a way to clone systems from a master image at 5 to 10 at a time. The image I need to clone is Linux and I wanted to only use open source tools. I ended up over at Clonezilla reading about DRBL and clonezilla server there. Here is the basics of it on Linux:
- Setup a linux system to act as a server and install the clonezilla packages. I chose to use Ubuntu 8.04 since its very stable for me. I used a Intel Core Duo with an Intel motherboard and 8g of memory in a micro-ATX form factor.
- Install the relevant bits and bytes for clonezilla. Be sure to follow all the howto information. Run the scripts called drblsrv and drblpush to set things up.
- Capture an image you wish to use from a system. This saves it on disk.
- Now decide how you want to serve up the image. You can use multicast, broadcast, and unicast. I chose multicast and then had to get a switch that was a bit better. I settled on a Layer 2 dlink switch. Remember to add in support for UDP Multicast on port 2232 I believe it is in /etc/services. If you don’t do this, multicast will just fail. This one got me for a few days.
- Now set a machine to PXE boot after its all configured. Whammo! I get 5 systems cloning at the same time and they’re done in 15 minutes.
Next step for me is on a second ubuntu box I setup to do some intensive rsync’ing using no SSH, no compression, etc. But the basic clone is done and you have a working linux box. I’m cloning an rPath Linux distribution from Ubuntu AMD64 and it works a treat! I also do some post install configurations and error checking to ensure I’ve got the correct bits.
If you want a working cloning solution, give Clonezilla a try. You can get things up pretty quickly. Its free too!
