Clonezilla DRBL HOWTO

From openSUSE

Contents 1 Clonezilla and DRBL HOWTO 1.1 Installation 1.2 Configuring and Starting Clonezilla 1.2.1 Cloning the image

Clonezilla and DRBL HOWTO

Version: 11.x

This process has not been tested in openSUSE 11.x, if setup on newer versions of SUSE differ than this one then please edit as needed.

This HOWTO guides you to setting up Clonezilla and DRBL in openSUSE for remote disk imaging and cloning via PXE boot or Etherboot. This requires that all the computers that will clone this image to have the same hardware, it supports a large number of file systems including FAT and NTFS.

Installation

This part is about setting up Clonezilla and DRBL, it assumes that you already have SUSE installed on the deployment server.

For best results set up your network connections with a static IP rather than a dynamic one.

The first step to getting DRBL setup is to download it from here, once you have that setup you need to make sure that the hard drive that is going to be hosting the image has DMA mode active to do this you need to run this command: replacing x with the drive letter. If it is not active then this will turn it on . By default DRBL will look for the image to /home/partimag, make this directory mounting it on the drive with DMA mode on, once you have the directory setup you will need to download and install the following packages, not in the SUSE repos or build service:

clonezilla-2.3.1-57.i386.rpm
drbl-chntpw-0.0.20040818.i386.rpm
drbl-etherboot-5.4.3-2.i386.rpm
drbl-lzop-1.02-0.8drbl.i386.rpm
drbl-ntfsprogs-2.0.0-1.i386.rpm
drbl-partimage-0.6.7-1drbl.i386.rpm
freedos-1.0-11drbl.i386.rpm
gpxe-0.9.5-1drbl.i386.rpm
mkpxeinitrd-net-1.2-33.i386.rpm
mkswap-uuid-0.1.0-3.i386.rpm
partclone-0.0.8-3.i386.rpm
udpcast-20071228-1drbl.i386.rpm

You can download these packages from this server.

Once you have all of those packages installed it is time to run the DRBL setup script, where it will list even more packages you have to install, the good news is these are in the SUSE repos/build service, to do this you need to run this script: , after this you will need to setup DRBL for the kernel/architecture that the clients are running, if this is the same as the server you can cheat but just running other wise you will need to replace the `uname -r` with the correct kernel version.

Now all that is left is setting up DHCP, TFTP, and NFS the programs that ship with SUSE will do just fine making sure to give enough IPs in your DHCP server setup for all your clients, for TFTP you need to set the boot image directory to /tftpboot and for NFS you need to place /home/partimag directory in your exports list with read/write permissions.

Configuring and Starting Clonezilla

At this point all that should be left is configuring Clonezilla and starting it. In order to setup Clonezilla you need to have it copy the image of one of your client machines, to do this you need to run the setup command and select the following options:

• Clonezilla-start
• Clonezilla-save-disk
• Boot up the client machine ether in PXE boot or Etherboot
• If you did not pick an image or device name during the setup of Clonezilla then you will be asked for one here

Cloning the image

Now its time to restore the image to the clients, to do this you need to change the mode that Clonezilla is running in from Clonezilla-save-disk to clonezilla-restore-disk then boot boot the client into it. Once all clients are finished you can stop clonezilla to keep the clients from re-grabbing the image with the clonezilla-stop command.