Building multiple systems?

How do you build multiple systems?

Do you have a master drive which you clone?

How do you make your master?

Do you use RAID on your systems? How do you master the RAID system?

Thanks.

Jeff

I use Hardware RAID set to 5 with 4+ Drives.

I dont use a master but i did build an installation script for CentOS that install all needs and customize the server with my usual customizations.

Regards

Does it also install DirectAdmin? I use DirectAdmin with customizations and security fixes and I'd like to be able to install multiple machines very quickly and efficiently.

Anyone?

Thanks.

Jeff

Yes, it install DirectAdmin aswell.

At now, the only problem that occur sometimes is that yum skip the installation pre-requisites, not sure why, i think i'll put a sleep 5 before that

Regards

SeLLeRoNe said:

I use Hardware RAID set to 5 with 4+ Drives.

I dont use a master but i did build an installation script for CentOS that install all needs and customize the server with my usual customizations.

Regards

Click to expand...

Why would you use raid-5 instead of raid-10? Dont you know how much slower it is.

Well since now i never soffered on slow disks, i know 10 is quite faster but regarding space avaible to use is like a raid6 in case of 4 disks.

Regards

SeLLeRoNe said:

Yes, it install DirectAdmin aswell.

Click to expand...

Nevertheless I'm not sure if that would work for us, we want multiple builds which are exactly the same, and we want to be able to do them as quickly as duplicating a drive.

Anyone else had a go at this?

Jeff

Well you should create a standard server and than create an image of it with Acronis True Image and use their bootable CD to recover the image (from cd/dvd or from an url) to restore the image on every new server...

Also you should consider to compress a working system (excluding some directory) and create a bootable cd (or nfs drive) that make partitions, format and uncompress the file in a brand new box

Regards

rsync or drdb

@SeLLeRoNe:

Acronis True Image may be a good idea; thanks. I'll look into it.

How would I go about building the same thing on software RAID? Do you suggest building the new drive as non-RAID then converting it to RAID and building the second drive on the new box in realtime?

Also you should consider to compress a working system (excluding some directory) and create a bootable cd (or nfs drive) that make partitions, format and uncompress the file in a brand new box

Click to expand...

I'm not sure of the benefit of this; what I really want is a drive I can just stick into a server.

@scsi:

I'm not ure how rsync can help me create an exact image of an install; I believe it's a file-based system, and I'm looking for exact copy drives, to keep one on the shelf to mirror to another drive to install in a new machine when ordered.

Thanks for the reference to drdb, but when I look it up it appears to be a high-availability system, and that's not what I'm looing for; I'm looking for a way to build additional servers quickly, with exactly the same setup as the previous one.

Jeff