On Wed, 20 Mar 2013 21:03:13 Hans Witvliet wrote:
...
I'm not sure we're talking the same thing.
* what does 'boot rescue' mean? * 'create file system' where * 'mount' what where and how?
I'm assuming that what you mean is
1. Take the bootable usb to the target machine and boot with it 2. Run fdisk on the target machine's hard disk to set up swap and FS 3. Run mkswap & mkfs on the targets machine's hard drive 4. do magic.
I suspect the magic involves having a machine image - what you are terming the tar file - as well as the bootable image on the usb stick. I'd expect that tar file to be about 10G, so we have a non-trivial usb stick, call a 32G.
Is this what you mean?
COS IT ISN'T WHAT I WAS THINKING OF!
I was assuming that the same image that I was running on the USB stick could be 'ghosted' onto the hard drive. Yes that raises questions about the disk layout but its fast! I was aiming for "Fast and Simple" maybe doing this over lunch. For a hundred machines with five sticks. FAST!
So I'm interesting hearing other ways of doing it.
I have used dd to do this. If you google ghosting and linux you should get some hits. Clonezilla comes to mind (can't recall ever using it). Using something like dd is very fast and partition alignment of different drive sizes might be the only issue to work out before hand. I have also used methods similar to the one you "weren't thinking of" - boot floppy that connects to the network to download install scripts and rsync, partition based on drive found on board, rsync the template OS onto the hard drive, assign ID and addresses, boot new host. This is also pretty fast. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org