Network cloning of raid array
Jonathan Hutchins
hutchins at tarcanfel.org
Fri Nov 12 10:01:24 CST 2004
On Tuesday 09 November 2004 10:25 am, Brad wrote:
> I have 2 raid 5 systems that I need to install to be identical. I was
> hoping someone might know of a way to install and configure the first,
> and then clone it over the network. Yes, I could use ghost, but I was
> hoping there was a nice way of doing it with Linux utilities.
(Coming in to this a little late, my Squirrelmail system is annoyingly slow.)
I don't see any reason you couldn't use ghost, but you could use tar or other
simple copy utilities as well.
If you don't have a specific reason that the copy must happen over the network
- if the two machines _can_ be in physical proximity during setup - than the
easiest thing is going to be to set up the first system completely, then set
up the RAID on the second system. Pull one of the RAID drives from the
original system, replace it with a new drive. The RAID system will now
duplicate the swapped drive. Repeat as necessary. Once you have all but the
last drive copied, you can install the duplicated drives in the RAID array on
the new system and you should be able to boot to it. You can either allow
the secondary system to regenerate the final drive, or regenerate it on the
original system.
Brian K, I think, mentioned that Ghost-like utilities image a non-running
system. There's no reason you couldn't boot to a CD and use tar to image the
system without running it. It's actually an advantage of tar, that you can
copy a live or non-live system with it, while Ghost requires that you take
the system off-line.
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