Isn't KIWI(http://en.opensuse.org/KIWI) supposed to be the tool for that purpose? It can be used to make Xen images, so I see no reason why it could not make normal disk images. Anyway, I use autoyast for bootstraping the initial system and than use puppet(http://reductivelabs.com/projects/puppet/) for additional configuration. It takes a bit of learning, but it pays off after a while. Martin 2007/7/6, Carlos E. R. <robin.listas@telefonica.net>:
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The Friday 2007-07-06 at 10:10 +0100, G T Smith wrote:
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Looking at the AutoInstall documentation further it seems that it uses a XML based script which largely goes through the options described by other posters in cloning a machine. Real problem is that no mechanism seems to exist to import an existing package configuration into the script and support for non-SuSE supported applications and other things (e.g. Netbeans, Funambol) that deploy either using a bin or jar file is a bit limited.
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For my purposes, I want to establish a base-line configuration that has some flexibility on hardware configuration, so the next time I have the kind of messy system collapse I have just had, or I want to move to new hardware I can quickly get going again. Unfortunately, binary level disk image cloning is not an option, and even it was does not have any flexibility (it is rare after a hardware related failure that one is restoring to the same hardware configuration).
For hardware flexibility, autoyast would be best, probably.
However, another solution is simply to have a standard backup in a server, You fire up a live system in a client (usb?), then fire a script, either in usb or remote that does the formatting of the hd, mount the new empty filesystem into the live system, create the empty dirs for /dev, /sys, /proc, then the copying over of files from the server using something like rsync. The final step would be to install grub automatically. Ah, no, I forget: you need to copy over some files for host name and ip, and probably run suseconfig.
Another possibility is to run autoyast, then run rsync over the result to install "the rest" of things.
Actually, I like better the autoyast thing: it will handle things like card differences.
If you want disk images, then try ghost for linux. It doesn't have the whistles of the commercial Ghost, but it should do.
- -- Cheers, Carlos E. R.
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