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.