We have a limited, small, number of IEEE 802.3 connected hardware
platform identical workstations to clone -- no 802.11 nor any shared
(remote, distributed) disk storage (at this time). My plan was to get
one fully operational and configured, and then clone the hard drive
image onto the remaining machines one hard drive at a time.
Let A represent the operational (clone source) machine, and Bhd a target
hard drive. The hard drive on A is /dev/sda, call it Ahd. A is shut
down power off. Bhd is installed into an available bay on A, A is
booted, and Bhd appears as /dev/sdb in A. Using dd on A, clone /dev/sda
to /dev/sdb . Mount on A the partition of /dev/sdb that contains /etc
(there are no end user home directories -- only home directories are
those of the system administration users). Using a text editor (e.g.,
vi), modify the /etc/sysconfig/net* scripts/directories, as well as
/etc/hosts. for the name and IP address of machine B that will contain
Bhd (resolv.conf will be the same -- all of these machines are in the
same DNS subzone, same TCP/IP subnet). Iterate through all of the
target workstation hard drives. As there are no other distributed
services running, this should suffice.
Shutdown A, remove Bhd, install Bhd into B, boot B upon which Bhd should
appear as /dev/sda . Done.
Is there a better method in terms of software? At this time, I do not
want to setup a remote image server that effectively will download the
full image of Ahd onto Bhd over a network, nor do I want to make a
custom install DVD as we only have a small number of workstations to
clone, not, say, one hundred.
I do understand that if Ahd and Bhd present different bad blocks to the
OS, and these are not "hidden" by the intelligence on each individual
hard drive, then dd may not work. However, the drives already have been
surveyed and the bad block situation should not be an issue.
A related question (that was partially addressed in a different thread):
is there a way to remove/disable Network Manager and use a traditional
static configuration? On a laptop that needs to move within the field
from one 802.11 network to another, with a different DNS zone and TCP/IP
configuration, Network Manager provides similar ease and functionality
to the end user autoconfiguration applications that are used under Mac
OS X or modern MS Win. This is unnecessary and in some sense dangerous
for static workstations that need no such dynamic configuration.
My thought was to find the RPM that installs Network Manager and simply
uninstall it, either via yum or a simple rpm -e command. Is Network
Manager too deeply ingrained in current EL6 (using TUV compliant model)
to make this feasible?
Yasha Karant
|