Theory or functional?

[CurtE]

I've been playing around with an idea and I'm not qualified to know if it is a functional thought.

First idea/question.

If I have a Dell PowerEdge server and setup Gentoo on it with all the software for my needs, what would I need to do to copy it to a duplicate Dell machine? It seems that I should be able to just "zip" it up and "unzip" it to the new machine but would that be possible? Or do I need to set up a basic Gentoo system first and then copy the "guts" over?

Second idea/question.

If the two servers are not the same make and model, what would you need to do?

My basic analogy is that Gentoo is the frame, drivetrain and engine (hardware) of the car and that the software is the shell, seats, radio and features of the car. I'm thinking that with that logic, you could copy the features from Gentoo and just stick it onto new hardware without a problem. Copying USR, VAR and ETC (and whatever I don't know) onto a new machine, should dup the system.

The idea is to make a duplicate server from my server, in case the inevitable happens (crash, boom, bang). What am I messed up on or am I correct in my logic?

[invasivenorman]

You would need to make sure your kernel supports all of the hardware you need on both machines*.
You would need to make sure that whatever you were using to "zip and unzip" supported all of the necessary metadata (schg, suid, acls, hardlinks, symlinks, whatnot). dump(1) is the old reliable method, but I've not used it under Linux. tar(1) would probably work for most circumstances (hard links? I dunno).
You probably want different ssh keys & hostnames (& ip addresses) on the different machines, if you're going to run them at the same time.

Also, what's up with the big letters?


* edit: make sure your CFLAGS= && CXXFLAGS= setting is compatible with the cpus on both machines too (eg don't use -march=native if they don't support the exact same instruction set)
_________________
gurgle

[keenblade]

I suggest you to read firstly [Howto] Creation of a Stage 5 archive
and then HOWTO: Easily make a full system backup (stage4).
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Anyway it's all the same at the end...
Need help to get it working: "x-fi surround 5.1"

[NeddySeagoon]

CurtE,

For *identical* hardware you will need to reinstall grub to the MBr and change the hostname. Optioally, if you use a static network setup, change the IP address too.

As its a server, if you set it up in raid1, you can move one of the drives to the other machine, so each has one installed drive and one blank drive and allow both machines to rebuild the mirror set.
You will still need to do the above.
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[CurtE]

LOL. First, big letters, thought it would be easier to see. I'm getting old.

Part of what was going through my mind was the idea of mass creation of servers for others. Obviously, I would have to change host name and other specific names for the servers after they were "cloned" but it would save a lot of time in the long run if you had a lot of servers (or even desktops) to do. I had created for my last job, a modified Ubuntu install DVD and thought maybe there was an easier way to get the majority of the stuff preset in Gentoo.

I'm still in the theory stage of backing up my system, so I'll be looking into this closer. Thanks for the answers.

[NeddySeagoon]

CurtE,

You can make a BINHOST, with binary packages of the things you need, including your custom config files, then write a script to install Gentoo from the BINHOST over the network.
You might even like to PXE boot your install targets.

If you need to install many idetical boxes at the same time, distcc is a nice tool. Set up one box as a master and BINHOST, have all the boxes doing builds.
This approach is called a build farm or compile farm.

Both systems are documented on the gentoo website.

If all you need is a backup, google stage4.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[keenblade]