[YLUG] clone fedora 10

[Alex Howells]

2008/12/25 mike cloaked <mike.cloaked at gmail.com>:
> OK if the OP is copying an f10 disk to another yeah you are right
> about copying across security contexts as well ...

Well, anything should be preserved by dd really.

> There have been a number of posts by the same OP about converting up
> from FC7 to F10 and I must have been tired as I misunderstood that
> this was trying to clone an FC7 disk and making it upgrade to F10..

I'd suggest he see if his graphics "just work" under another
distribution like Ubuntu, since it may be easier to do that than fix
this ;)  Pretty much everything I'd be able to suggest has already
been mentioned, and I'm not a Fedora user/expert - sorry!

> My best bet for doing an install on a different machine would not be
> to copy a hard drive bit for bit and then physically transferring the
> drive, but to make a kickstart file and run the install from the DVD
> iso using the kickstart file to define what you want in the installed
> system.

Still doesn't configure the applications for you...

> roll.... why anyone would then want to do a disk verbatim copy and
> shift it from one machine to another beats me.

Because in the absence of CFengine it lets you get a fully configured
(and customized) root filesystem from machine1 to machine2 with
absolute minimum fuss. It's about 6 minutes actual "work", where 1
minute is starting the copy and 5 is setting up the MBR and
potentially altering stuff like the initrd =) Plus a variable amount
of time for the copy?

> Starting from initiating the install I get the basic system
> operational in about 15 minutes - then change my /etc/yum.repos.d/
> files to look at mirrors I want only , and then immediately yum update
> - on a system not too long past the release date the number of updates
> is usually small and on a reasonable speed connection this update
> takes usually less than 20 minutes or so. Then the basic configuring
> might take me an hour.  So less than two hours after hitting the first
> button I usually have a working system.   I wonder how this compares
> with making a verbatim copy of an existing disk and moving it across
> to a different machine, plus checking/updating/configuring?   I would
> be surprised if it is any better but then I will be happy to be amazed
> by your reports of the smaller time taken to do this compared to an
> install as I describe above?

Meh, YMMV. Two hours vs. 15 minutes including the data copy since
1000Mbps LAN gives me 85MB/second between computers.

Either 'dd' or 'rsync' should give you good result IMO, although the
latter is my preferred method (slightly more work as you need to
partition and format) as it allows you to cope with disks which may
not have identical geometries.

There's no way I'd want to do anything other than "imaged" installs
(disk images, or tarball-based root filesystems) for [any] work
purposes either, Kickstart is good but isn't great if you need to
regularly install Debian/Ubuntu or anything else which isn't
RPM-based.

> Have a good Christmas.

You too :)

Alex