HD cloning

[Felix Rauch]

On Mon, 4 Dec 2000, Rich Grenyer wrote:
> Has anyone had any experience with cloning hard drives for cluster 
> installations? Our cluster needs fully functional disk-based nodes 
> unfortunately, and I don't feel like running through the RedHat 
> installation procedure that many times - any suggestions, or am I 
> just being lazy?

We use our own tool "Dolly" to clone cluster nodes. The tool is not
very user friendly (lack of time to work on it :-( , therefore we use
simple config-files (one per cloning-operation)), but it does fast
clones to any number of nodes, where the speed is independant on the
number of nodes (e.g. 2 GB partition to 24 machines takes < 4 minutes).

For more information, see the README-File:
http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/CoPs/patagonia/dolly.html

We presented a paper at EuroPar 2000. Information about the paper as
well as the source for the tool can be found on:
http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/CoPs/patagonia/

- Felix
-- 
Felix Rauch                      | Email: rauch at inf.ethz.ch
Institute for Computer Systems   | Homepage: http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/~rauch/
ETH Zentrum / RZ H18             | Phone: ++41 1 632 7489
CH - 8092 Zuerich / Switzerland  | Fax:   ++41 1 632 1307