Cloning Operating Systems

Anytime we think about installing OS on more than one system 'cloning' comes to our attention. Because we are too lazy :-). Well that is one of the important characteristics of Systems Administrator so that he/she is forced to automate. This document exploit the power of low level data transfer command popularly known as 'dd' and netcat. These programs are available for all major UNIX, Linux and Windows platforms. These commands are fairly popular among Forensics Analysis professionals.

Problem Description

You got more than 1 machine with almost same hardware. i.e. same hard drive, SCSI card, graphics etc. You setup one single machine from top to bottom and now it is time to replicate OS setup on other machines. Commercial Software such as Ghost does a good job in cloning Windows based machines and now many of these software support Linux ext2 file system also. dd although very crude but gives you enough flexibility to manipulate cloning as you wish. We have demonstrated cloning of hard drives in machines loaded with Linux, Win2K, Solaris, HPUX machines using dd . This document is not a single click solution so you may have to juggle through here first. Once you get a hold of this process then it is very powerful to create your own disk cloning schemes save lots of time and hassle. If you are ready, proceed further