[OT] System Imaging

[J. Epperson]

On Tue, March 27, 2007 04:18, Peter Kjellstrom wrote:
> On Tuesday 27 March 2007, Jesse Proudman wrote:
>> I have a particular install of RedHat that I want to store as an
>> image and copy to new servers we deploy.  I've got a PXE boot server,
>> and that's been working to install over the network, but is there a
>> way that I can do a disk format and then copy a disk image without
>> having to do a full install?
>
> People typicall go about this in one of two ways:
> 1) image based, like systemimager or dolly.
>  si: http://www.systemimager.org
>  dolly: http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/CoPs/patagonia/dolly.html
> 2) automated installs (like kickstart, autoyast, etc.)
>
> Interpreting your post I'd say start with systemimager.
>

And I'd say start with g4l.  But tastes vary.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/g4l/

Have had great success with this.  One particular thing to note is that
zeroing empty space will have a huge impact on the compressed image size
and time required for image/restore.  There's plenty of info about this in
the g4l project pages and iso.