Duplicate a server

[wobbe]

DVD as a backup? That's what you do at home.
I would never not rely on DVD's for a backup!
They degrade are easily misplaced and take forever to restore. Use your network and another server to make a backup. Of course you should also implement an offsite disaster recovery plan when the server is really important.

[Qcheck]

Wobbe,

I want to replicate an existing server to the laptop. So I thought to burn the forst iso image to the dvd. So I burned to the DVD but it is failing to restore at the partition table as /dev/hda1 is tiny.

Thanks

[Qcheck]

Help please. I am stuck at the mount point.

It says /dev/hda doesn't contain a valid partition. And asks me to edit the following:

Device Mountpoint Format Size(B)
/dev/hda2 lvm lvm 4278
/dev/VolGroup000/LogVol00 / ext3 0
/dev/hda1 /boot ext3 11
/dev/VolGroup000/LogVol01 swap 0

So asks me to edit the mount list and /dev/hda is tiny.

so what needs to change? I get the command prompt but I don't know what to change?

Thank you

[Alexander Chuzhoy]

One of the easiest ways to literally replicate a server is to use the good old dd command in conjunction with netcat.

Download some version of Linux that runs out of CD (like Knoppix) and boot the destination server with this CD.

on source machine:

dd if=/dev/hda (or whatever devicename stands for the hard drive) | netcat targethost-IP 1234

on target machine:

netcat -l -p 1234 | dd of=/dev/hda (or whatever devicename stands for the hard drive)

http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/answers/Applications_GUI_Multimedia/How_To_Do_Eveything_With_DD

[Qcheck]

Alexander,

Thank you for your reply. So can I follow the below steps:

targethost-IP=192.168.1.2
targethost harddisk size: 320G
Source hardisk size:
[root@server log]# pvdisplay
--- Physical volume ---
PV Name /dev/hda2
VG Name VolGroup00
PV Size 74.41 GB / not usable 31.09 MB
Allocatable yes (but full)
PE Size (KByte) 32768
Total PE 2380
Free PE 0
Allocated PE 2380
PV UUID Ngsx2A-O85C-PDal-dGGq-9DQe-Wann-1XeHnB
[root@server log]#

1) Install the base O/S(Linux 5.2) on target machine.
2) On source machine:
dd if=/dev/hda2 | netcat 192.168.1.2 1234
3) On target machine:
netcat 192.168.1.2 1234 | dd of=/dev/sda

Will this work?

[Qcheck]

Elko,

I only able to restore until the following state:

Restoring from archives
Restoring data from the archives, please wait. This may take some time.

Restoring from fileset # 152 on CDR #1

7:47 taken 49:42 remaining
13% done 87% to go

So any idea, why it is stopping after that? I tried 4 or 5 times, still stopping at the same place at 13%. Any ideas?

Thank you