On Wed, 21 Apr 2010, Chris Cappuccio wrote:
To make your deployment faster, just use fdisk, disklabel, newfs to setup the disk and tar to copy the files. That's a much smarter/faster way to go, even with TRIM support. I automated it in 'growimg' for flashdist/flashrd, for instance. Of course that assumes you only have one disklabel partition, but your servers are probably more complicated than that.
The nice thing about dd is that it is simple-- you can set up a system with a shell one-liner and after the reboot, just change a few config files. The idea is that novice administrators on our staff could get something up and running quickly.
The reality is that our novice administrators rarely do any real server deployment-- it's really just me and another guy-- so when it comes down to it, this is just a time-saving measure for us. The genesis of it was from doing this with CF onto Soekris or other SBCs where actually doing an install directly onto the CF is a PITA (do the install in a VM, then dd the VM's disk). It doesn't need to be simple as long as it saves time and errors. So I think I will indeed look into ideas like yours. I like Chris Dukes' suggestion to replace baseXX.tgz and use the installer, since unlike Soekris boxes, these machines have CD readers and video hardware.
Dan
