Re: [tlug] Tip of the Day: "ghosting" a machine with nc and dd

["emiddleton@example.com" <emiddleton@example.com>]

I tend to just forward over ssh because it is already setup, you don't
have to worry about firewalls and if your really transferring more then
a few G's its easier to just throw the drive in a caddy and connect it
directly, but each to his own.

ssh user@example.com 'lvcreate -nhda1.backup -L2G /dev/raid1'
dd if=/dev/hda1 |ssh destinationhost 'dd of=/dev/raid1/hda1.backup'


Josh Glover wrote:
> 4. Determine the device name of the hard drive on each machine. If you
> have an IDE (Wikipedia) drive, your device will almost certainly be
> /dev/hda, and if you have a SCSI (Wikipedia) (or SATA (Wikipedia)? can
> someone confirm this) drive, it will be /dev/sda. To verify this, run:

Or if you have an IDE device using a libata driver.

> 8. Once the transfer finishes (you will know when you get dropped back
> to a command prompt; switch to a different virtual terminal and run
> top if you'd like to monitor the procedure--dd and nc processes should
> be consistently near the top until completion), reboot the target
> machine off its hard drive

You can also hit dd with a
# kill -s INFO pid

which will tell you how far it has got.

Edward