Quickest way to repave a bunch of machines

[Kevin M. Davisson]

My company is donating @30 C160, C200, & C240's to a college. Policy is to wipe all company info from the hard drives, so I'd like to repave them all with fresh bootable O/S (ready to prompt for language & network info - trying to be a nice guy). Machines are all in a pile & I don't want to take time to setup & boot them up individually to ignite - is there a quicker way to clone the disks? "dd" perhaps?

[Patrick Wallek]

I can't think of anything that would be much quicker than an Ignite golden image.

[Pete Randall]

With dd, you're going to end up with identical configurations: IP address, hostname, MAC address, that sort of thing. This could prove to be problematic for the recipient unless you correct each one.

Pete

[Ken Hubnik_2]

I agree with Patrick I think igniting would be the quickest and cleanest way to clone.

[Paul Sperry]

One word
Ignite

[Kevin M. Davisson]

Sorry I wasn't clear - no network to Ignite server and I'm not planning on hauling them all across campus. I've cold-installed the first with networking set to "ask at first boot". Is "dd still a bad way? Should I make a recovery tape and just keep swapping in disks and building from tape?

[Ken Hubnik_2]

You have to use media to ignite.

[Ian Dennison_1]

How IT-savvy are the college? Give them 1 working server, one Ignite tape and wave them on their way?

Alternatively if the disks are hot-swappable / easily removable,...

Power up 2 machines networked
Configure 1 as an Ignite Server, take a snapshot of the primary OS onto Disk.
Boot Machine 2 from a basic tape
Pull/push the ignite image to the Machine 2
Power down machine 2, swap hard drive, repeat 28 more times.

Don't you have operators that would like Ignite training?

Share and Enjoy! Ian

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

Do all the machines have a tape drive? If so you can make a make_tape_recovery tape or 2 and boot them from tape.

The problem with moving disks around between machines is that there is guarantee that the disk path is going to be the same on every machine. Thus, a boot disk created on machine A is not guaranteed to work on machine B.

If the machines don't have an internal tape drive do you have an external you could attach so you can boot from tape?

[Kevin M. Davisson]

Sounds like the most straightforward solution to guarantee the drives are wiped before leaving our site. I've got some external tape drives. I'll make_tape_recovery from the first, then attach to each machine in turn, boot, recover, and move on. Too bad I'm a one-man show here - even with two tape drives going this will take a while...

[Laurie Gellatly]

Once you've made the tape (shouldn't take too
long) then its only a couple of minutes to
configure each machine and the rest of the
recovery can be left to happen while you do
other things. As you suggest, its easier to
do with a common portable tape if they
don't have common tape media.

...Laurie :{)

[Steven E. Protter]

If you don't care about laying down an OS, you can pvcreate -f /dev/rdsk/c#t#d# all of the disks.

Deliver them with the latest media and let the college handle the install themselves.

Last current license probably comes with the systems and if the college wants to upgrade they can buy their own software support contract.

If the imperitive if delivering a bootable OS and no media, you can't do it my way, if you simply want to makes sure your data is gone the pvcreate and maybe a mediainit will do the job.

P