Network cloning of raid array

Jonathan Hutchins hutchins at tarcanfel.org
Fri Nov 12 10:01:24 CST 2004


On Tuesday 09 November 2004 10:25 am, Brad wrote:

> I have 2 raid 5 systems that I need to install to be identical.  I was
> hoping someone might know of a way to install and configure the first,
> and then clone it over the network.  Yes, I could use ghost, but I was
> hoping there was a nice way of doing it with Linux utilities.   

(Coming in to this a little late, my Squirrelmail system is annoyingly slow.)

I don't see any reason you couldn't use ghost, but you could use tar or other 
simple copy utilities as well.

If you don't have a specific reason that the copy must happen over the network 
- if the two machines _can_ be in physical proximity during setup - than the 
easiest thing is going to be to set up the first system completely, then set 
up the RAID on the second system.  Pull one of the RAID drives from the 
original system, replace it with a new drive.   The RAID system will now 
duplicate the swapped drive.  Repeat as necessary.  Once you have all but the 
last drive copied, you can install the duplicated drives in the RAID array on 
the new system and you should be able to boot to it.  You can either allow 
the secondary system to regenerate the final drive, or regenerate it on the 
original system.

Brian K, I think, mentioned that Ghost-like utilities image a non-running 
system.  There's no reason you couldn't boot to a CD and use tar to image the 
system without running it.  It's actually an advantage of tar, that you can 
copy a live or non-live system with it, while Ghost requires that you take 
the system off-line.



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