All material Copyright (c) Deer Run Associates. All rights reserved. Permission to distribute freely as long as this Copyright is preserved. This is a suite of tools designed to "clone" images of (single-disk) systems by leveraging Sun's Jumpstart technology. This makes for rapid installs when large networks of essentially similar machines need to be created simultaneously or on at "at-will" basis (think Web farms and networks of engineering workstations). More information on Jumpstart and this cloning process can be found in a presentation at http://www.deer-run.com/~hal/jumpstart/Jumpstart.pdf The process is driven primarily by a single custom pre-install script which takes care of formatting the target system's drives (based on a pre-defined template provided by the administrator-- see the INSTALL document), building file systems, and restoring dump images of the "standard" build from a central server. Host files are then tweaked to give the target machine a new network identity, but otherwise the new machine is an exact duplicate of the old one. Additional customization can be performed with post-install scripts (a sample is provided with this distribution). Speed of install is essentially limited only by disk speed and available network bandwidth. Install time should be cut at least in half as compared to a regular Jumpstart install of a comparable image. Two quick notes are appropriate: -- As written, the clone process essentially assumes that the system image comes from and will be written to a single-disk system. Expect to have to hack around on the scripts to clone multi-disk images. -- There isn't really any particular reason why the clone script couldn't copy non-Solaris images onto the target system's disks. For example, I suspect the process could be finessed to install Linux or *BSD images onto Sparc hardware (or even Intel and PowerPC platforms, since Sun supports these for Jumpstarts). The tricky part would be creating non-UFS file systems for the target host (such as xfs under Linux) from within the Jumpstart install process. Comments, questions, problems, bugfixes, and gifts of food and money should be directed to the author at the email address below. Happy cloning! Hal Pomeranz