RE: [Trinux-talk] Q - Timothy Burt - Backup or clone hard drive

[Riaan L. <ri...@ra...>]

Exactly what I am busy with. The stores where our software (winNT) is
curently running in are distributed all over South Africa, which is quit a
vast space.

The staff at the stores where these machines are in operation are also as
technically inclined as my cat, (ZERO). So I am busy building a script that
will autoexecute in Trinux (once the store manager has put the cd and floppy
in the machine and rebooted.). Then through the script
1.)delete one of the NTFS partitions on the Disk. (It currently has two
partitions, one 2GB and one 6GB) I have to preserve the 6Gb partition due to
the data contained on it. (Here I am still OK thanks to Timothy's cloning
article)
2.) reformat the /dev/hda so that Debian will run on it.  --> 50Mb /boot,
120Mb swap, 1200Mb / (Still no problems.)
3.) copy the root filesystem from a cd (due to the fact that I cannot use
the wan due to bandwidth constraints) onto the newly formatted disk. (Here I
am a bit out of my league with the, I folloed Timothy's cloning article but
the instead of sending it to a disk sent the data to a NFS share. The data
seems to cpio fine. It is only when I run chroot that I get the applet error
(I tried to reinstall the baselib.tgz but got;

"trinux> getpkg baselib
Retrieving http://172.30.166.8/riaan/baselib.tgz
Initializing baselib
-- Rebuilding ld.so.cache
Segmentation fault
trinux> chroot
chroot: applet not found"

4.) If I use the command "lilo -r /new" as per the cloning article I get " a
segment to large error"

once I go and use the lilo on the mounted filesystem /mnt/sbin/lilo -r
/mnt -C etc/lilo.conf -v -v -v it seems as though MBR is written to
5.) phone the store manager ask them to reboot the machines and have a
stable env. from where to run our system.

The above mentioned are just for those "listening to this thread to know
what I am trying to do. My questions however are:
1. Can I tar the filesystem that I have made a copy of put it on cd, untar
the tar onto the machine once the cd is in the machine at the store without
losing files or permissions. (I got very cool reply from Timothy and will
try it once I am back at work tomorrow morning (00:09 now) P.S. Timothy I am
not sure what other file system I can use other than ISO? Will the fact that
I tar the filesystem not solve my file permissions problems>

2.Is the whole Linux (Debian ) file system actually just a bunch of files in
a bunch of directories that will, once they are copied to another machine
act as it was cloned (varying sizes of the disk obviously excluded) or is
there underlying detail that stops me from just copying teh files over to a
new harddrive and expecting the machine to just boot up and act like the
master machine.

3. If the baselib package is installed at boot time but I still get chroot
applet errors after I reinstalled it: should I uninstall the baselibs (How?)
and try ad reinstall it romm scratch.

4. Once I get all this mess sorted out will everyone that helped me come for
a meal at my place (Cape Town SA --> sunny beaches nice girls and a lot of
sun?

Thanks.

Riaan Labuschagne
e-mail: ri...@ra...
+27 83 4444148
+27 21 982 2223
+27 21 982 2225 (fax)
Visit http://www.radioretail.co.za


-----Original Message-----
From: Timothy Burt [mailto:tb...@ar...
Sent: 02 October 2002 10:54
To: P60
Cc: ri...@ra...; Trinux-Talk (E-mail)
Subject: Re: [Trinux-talk] Q - Timothy Burt - Backup or clone hard drive



Better to mail them the floppy, with an ssh login configured.  Then you
can make adjustments, monitor progress and fix problems during the
upgrade.

And never leave your office. :-)

Always good for the outer offices to have, in case their machine won't
boot.  You can ssh into Trinux, and look at your disk, or what is left of
it.  Even fdisk and reformat it from the command line.  And overnight them
a new disk drive, if all else fails.  With Trinux, you can do the setup
from your chair.

Of course, with a script in /tux/last, it can become a brutally efficient
Windows exterminator.

On Wed, 2 Oct 2002, P60 wrote:

>
>
> > I will definitely look at it but the problem is that I doing the restore
> > over a wan i.e. very low bandwidth.
> >
> Thinking about 430 machines, walking around with a CD, will be more a
> problem I guess. If you're handy on writing scripts, you could have each
> machine that already has the Debian-stuff on it serving (with netcat
again)
> to the NT ones who you'll have to boot from the trinux netfloppy with a
nice
> little script in /tux/last. That way you'll only have to walk around once
> with a single floppy. Then have a nap :-). The lower the bandwidth, the
> longer the nap.
>
> Arne
>
>
>
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--
--------------------
Timothy Burt
General Manager
Arbor Group LLC
Los Angeles, Calif. USA