On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 01:52:58PM -0400, Daniel Barowy wrote: > > 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.
I also keep toying with the idea of an ugly little 'C' program that reads the source page by page. If the page is null, it does a seek instead of a write on the target. As for your soekris deploy method, I wonder if just telling the VM that the block device for the CF is the disk would suffice. -- Chris Dukes