Cloning setups

At my job, we’ve got a bunch of monitoring servers. I had set up one, that’s quite minimal and simple. And since what’s simple is also small it’d be quite easy to clone it.

How I cloned it through the network after spinning up a livecd of some linux:

1. Clone the partition table:

sfdisk -d /dev/sda > table # on the existing setup

2. Creating a partition table:

sfdisk /dev/sda < table # on remote host's live OS

3. Make a filesystem:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1 # And any others, if needed.

4. Mount the target partition on /mnt on the remote host

5. Install and start ssh daemon.

6. Copy the files:

rsync -aAXv --compress --compress-level=9 root@10.6.6.6:/mnt

7. Reset the boot loader’s code:

grub-install /dev/sda

(8.) reboot and you’re done! You’ve got a cloned linux setup!