Best way to clone an installation (copying to identical hardware)

Question

Kind-of like this question but slightly different (I think), in that I have 6 identical Acer Aspire Revo R3610 machines. One is (almost) configured to my requirements - when I'm done preparing it I'd like to make the other 5 machines absolutely the same. I'm very new to Ubuntu, what's the most straightforward (easiest) way of doing this?

The machines are going to live on different networks if that might otherwise be a problem (eg with Windows you can clone disks but you then have to make registry changes afterwards if they're going to run on the same network etc). The hardware in all 6 machines is, I stress, the same!

How can I efficiently clone one source image on to these identical machines?

Please restrict one software/solution per answer

Answer 1

Clonezilla sounds like it fits your needs

Answer 2

dd

A low level copy using dd would do the trick!

Watch out for conflicting IP addresses and hostnames.

Basically put the source drive and destination drive in the same machine, boot into a live cd. And run something like the following where /dev/sda is the source and /dev/sdb is the destination:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4096

I remember the operands by:

if -> input file

of -> output file

bs -> byte size (how many bytes to read at a time)

Answer 3

Create an image using Remastersys, transfer it to a pen drive using the Startup Disk Creator utility and install on other system.

Answer 4

Partimage

Another great cloning utility which I've used, as well. Features a terminal gui.

Answer 5

Having never done been in this predicament (I don't have hundreds of servers - I've always just used base images), I can only give you my gut instinct.

That aside, I would say netboot is probably your best bet. Create a master server, get it doing what you want and then have all your other machines boot and install from it. Scripting things to happen automatically (ala run-once) shouldn't be too hard. You do all the secondary things through kickstart.

More (although it's a little old): https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PXEInstallServer

Edit: There's an application called system-config-kickstart that should help make generating the kickstart file quite a bit easier. YMMV.

Answer 6

G4L

Ghost for Linux

Ghost for Linux is a hard disk and partition imaging and cloning tool similar to Norton Ghost(c) and (tm) by Symantec. The created images are optionally compressed, and they can be stored on a local hard drive or transferred to an anonymous FTP server. A drive can be cloned using the Click'n'Clone function. g4l supports file splitting if the local filesystem does not support writing files >2GB. The included kernel supports ATA, serial-ATA, and SCSI drives. Common network cards are supported. It is packaged as a bootable CD image with an ncurses GUI for easy use.

Answer 7

Another option for mass-installs is the Ubuntu Landscape/private cloud approach where you (basically) provision servers dynamically based on a pool of hardware. Clever stuff.

Answer 8

I would get one computer all the way you want it, and install the openssh-server package. Generate a ssh key pair with ssh-keygen -t rsa. Add the public key to /root/.ssh/authorized_keys2. Then I would boot the new computers with a live cd and plug in a usb stick with the ssh private key. Use gparted to create a new partition. Then mount the new partition and run something like sudo rsync -avzx -e "ssh -i /media/disk/path/to/privatekey" --exclude=".gvfs" root@<ImageComputerIP>:/ /path/to/new/partition/ Then I would follow the instructions on https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2#Reinstalling%20from%20LiveCD in the "Method 3-Chroot" section.

By the way, this works good for backup, too. Also, ubuntu, unlike Windows, doesn't seem to have problems being transplanted to different hardware. I've put hard disks from one computer in another and it did fine, and I've copied installs to different hardware and it did fine.