[YLUG] clone fedora 10

[Alex Howells]

2008/12/25 mike cloaked <mike.cloaked at gmail.com>:
> dd won't help as it will not have any SElinux contexts and you will be
> in a mess. (Unless you are planning to turn of SElinux)

Erm, what are you on about?

If you use 'dd' and pipe to something like 'socat' you're duplicating
the actual block device which will preserve everything on the disk,
including any filesystems *and* their SELinux contexts.

> But it is probably as much work to copy the disc as to install again -
> by all means copy the non-root areas but I would make a backup of
> /root /var and /etc and re-install and then just copy the key system
> files you need from the backup. If the disk is a replacement for the
> same machine then a dd copy would be a good way to do it.

Repeat previous statement about what you're on about. Unless you're
using something like Puppet or CFengine to apply configurations, the
"basic" packages (no custom configuration) are probably going to want
changing.

Method using rsync takes however long to punt over the data, and five
minutes to fix up the MBR.

Unless you're on a 56k modem this'll probably be faster than
reconfiguring a desktop/server from scratch, IMO.

> The key thing is that if the hardware is different then the initrd
> file will not work in the new system - so you will need to use
> mkinitrd to create a new ramdisk file.

Decent point.