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

[Attila Kinali <attila@example.com>]

On Tue, 17 Jul 2007 17:02:43 +0900
Nguyen Vu Hung <vu-hung@example.com> wrote:

> Attila Kinali ????????:
> > Hint: use tar on a preformated partition instead of dd.
> > The advantage is that you can deal with different sized
> > partitions with different filesystems (as long as they
> > support the unix semantics) and the amount of data
> > transfered is only the data stored on disk instead of
> > the size of the disk. 
> >   
> He is not only trying to backup so dd.

tar is not only for making backups ;-)

Of course, you need some extra work so that tar can work
(needs partitions, a filesystem, MBR) while dd just magicaly
does everything for you. But in case you have slightly different
disk sizes, the tar solution might be the better one.
But i'd expect anyone setting up a cluster to know that already
or very soon afterwards ;-)

> > Additionally, if you have considerably fast CPUs you can also
> > pipe it trough gzip to limit the bandwidth used.
> >   
> Even if you have a faster CPU, gzip is still better than bzip2. gzip 
> beats bzip2 in term of resource hoging &> Josh.

Yes. You need to have a very slow network and very fast CPUs
that the better compression ratio of bzip2 over gzip translates
into a better speed.

				Attila Kinali
-- 
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