Advertisement
If you have a new account but are having problems posting or verifying your account, please email us on hello@boards.ie for help. Thanks :)
Hello all! Please ensure that you are posting a new thread or question in the appropriate forum. The Feedback forum is overwhelmed with questions that are having to be moved elsewhere. If you need help to verify your account contact hello@boards.ie
Hi all,
Vanilla are planning an update to the site on April 24th (next Wednesday). It is a major PHP8 update which is expected to boost performance across the site. The site will be down from 7pm and it is expected to take about an hour to complete. We appreciate your patience during the update.
Thanks all.

Cloning setup

  • 30-09-2020 9:03am
    #1
    Tom Dunne
    Registered Users Posts: 23,212 ✭✭✭✭


    I've managed to convince our IT manager that banging Xubuntu onto 10+ year old PCs will give them a new lease of life. Office 365, Zoom, Teams and all of our web apps are working fine (as would be expected).



    One of the questions that arose is as follows: now that I have a fully working installation that they want to clone, what is the best way of doing this? Ideally clone the local hard drive to a bootable USB that can be installed on other PCs and will be a mirror image of this one.


Comments

  • #2
    niallb
    Registered Users Posts: 2,715 ✭✭✭niallb


    I've done exactly this in the past and while I've done it by hand using clonezilla,
    The FOG Project is the business.

    Do make a backup to a USB or network location using CloneZilla to start with, and if the number of machines is small it might be worth just walking the USB disk around.
    I tend to store one off images over ssh and as the USB boots to RAM, you can move on with the stick to the next machine while it's still pulling the image over the network.

    I used FOG on a small college network and it saved a load of time over a period of 5 years.
    I added a load of other tools to the PXE boot menu for diagnosing machines and hardware registration etc with the default being to boot from local hard disk.

    If you have PXE boot on all the machines and can set up a DHCP server it can be almost hands off.
    There's a web based administration page which allows you queue up jobs and instructions to back up or restore individual PCs.
    This makes future remote administration much easier.
    You'll need a basic system, physical or VM, that can provide TFTP/NFS/https access to images.

    You start by booting the working installation in upload mode to register your Xubuntu image, and then the others can even be done in parallel.
    Where it really wins is that you can redo your "gold standard" image every few months and have that be the new starting point.
    Any machine that gives trouble can be re-imaged from the boot screen if you leave PXE boot in the boot order.

    I also used it to load windows 7 onto almost 200 previously XP PCs over one weekend, so it scales well.
    It has some specific windows scripts for organising licensing and setting up printers etc.


  • #3
    croo
    Moderators, Technology & Internet Moderators Posts: 1,333 Mod ✭✭✭✭croo


    When moving laptops in the past, on a whim, I removed the drive from the new laptop & connected it to the old laptop via a cheap USB-2-SATA connector (a million cheap options on amazon), opened gparted and just copy & pasted the partitions from the old disk to the new. Put the new disk back in the laptop and it boot (gotta admit I was actually surprised!). A completely different brand of laptop with difference devices - the joys of linux! :)

    Of course you can also buy cheap(ish) disk cloners (I think I picked one up for 40-ish) - no need for a PC just put the two disks in the device and press the copy button.

    Two hacks compared to Niall's suggestions but they worked! :)


  • #4
    opus
    Registered Users Posts: 4,963 ✭✭✭opus


    I've been using kickstart to build Fedora desktops for years but will try out that FOG project as hadn't come across it before.


  • #5
    Keplar240B
    Registered Users Posts: 883 ✭✭✭Keplar240B


    dd command


  • #6
    rayzercork
    Registered Users Posts: 83 ✭✭rayzercork


    had a situation yesterday that i couldnt install my wifi drivers on a laptop in ubuntu because dkms and build essentials were missing and i had no wifi adaptor or ethernet available.
    after a while i realised i already had a xubuntu core install setup on a usb drive with the drivers included so plugged it in then copy pasted its partition onto the laptop with gparted. took a while but after everything copied over and gparted did its thing i rebooted and it booted up perfect. all i had to do after that was update the system and add a few applications i wanted.


  • Advertisement
Advertisement