Re: FreeBSD semi-automatic deployment

From: Tim Daneliuk (tundra_at_tundraware.com)
Date: 10/28/03 

Date: 28 Oct 2003 22:20:07 GMT

phn@icke-reklam.ipsec.nu wrote:

<SNIP>

>
> dd if=/dev/zero of=<filesystem/dummy> ; rm <filesystem/dummy>
> ( repeat for all filesystems, don't bother with swap partition)
>
>
> The above will create a file, filled with null-bytes until
> the filesystem is full, then removal of the same file will
> remove the inode and directory information, but all datablocks
> are still filled with zeroes.

Clever - never thought of that ...

>
>
> The remaining problem with ghost is that you will have to fill
> either a complete disk with an image of another complete disk, or
> you can fill a partition with a "partition-image". Both has it's
> pro's and con's, filling a disk will create boot-blocks and stuff,
> but your disks will all be equal size as your source. Partition

But why? If we've made the Ghost image highly compressable as above,
then writing a partition image file (a .gho file) to either cd or
another disk should result in a file much smaller than the size
of the slice we are backing up ... assuming, of course, the slice
has a lot of unused space on it.

Thanks for your very thorough answer ... 

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tim Daneliuk     tundra@tundraware.com
PGP Key:         http://www.tundraware.com/PGP/

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