[geeks] Disk images

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Michael Kaegler wrote:

> Once I needed to roll out a lab... had the image stored on a server, 
> then created a boot CD. The CD partitioned the drive, formatted it, 
> mounted it, and rsync'd from the server. You might just want to NFS 
> mount and dd if its not a unix/bsd fs, but... we continue to use 
> variations on that theme throughout all linux rollouts.
>
> Much higher latency, but higher throughput. And its drop+forget. And 
> fun to watch the blinkinlights/mrtg.
>
> 36 machines with 100mbit pulled their complete images from the 
> 1000mbit server in about 20 minutes. And we timed it so they all 
> started at the same time, just to create higher load and freak the 
> network guys out (this, of course, before I was a network guy).
> -mKaegler

I will try the network thing next. Right now the machines are very 
limited. They are older K6-400's rugged trunk-mount computers for 
policecars.

They don't have anything besides serial and pcmcia and a floppy drive. 
So I will need to build a linux distro that fits on one floppy and have 
drivers for 10/100 pcmcia nic and wifi.

Wifi so the police cruiser can just drive into the dock, slap a card in 
there and off goes the image (without having to actually remove the 
machine from the trunk). Or I might just pull cat5 cables into the docks 
with 10/100 nic's.

Right now i'm just testing here and the DD is 5gb big.

-- Thomas