[olug] Cheap ghost alternative...

Jordan Fox vmifox at gmail.com
Wed Jun 2 13:56:54 UTC 2010


I don't know if the project still exists, but a couple years ago I
played around with G4L (I'm guessing Ghost for Linux).  You use it
nearly the same way as norton ghost.  It worked pretty well.

Jordan

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 8:53 AM, Dan Linder <dan at linder.org> wrote:
> Over the weekend I needed to copy the partitions of one virtual machine to
> another over the network (moving HDDs wasn't an option).  For some reason I
> couldn't quickly find a free tool to do this (I thought the gparted tools
> use to do this...) but I found a page showing how to use NetCat and DD:
>
> Source machine:
>  dd if=/dev/sda | nc $DEST_IP $DEST_PORT -q10
>
> Destination Machine @ DEST_IP
>  nc -l $DEST_PORT | dd of=/dev/sda
>
> I was getting ~8MB/sec on in-home lan switch.
>
> To make the transfer more visible and see the speed in real-time, use the
> "pv" program - Pipe View.  It goes in-line between the nc and dd commands to
> show speed of data with output like this:
>    1.61GB 0:08:11 [7.63MB/s] [      <=>                                ]
>
> Place "| pv" between the nc and dd commands like this:
>  dd if=/dev/sda | pv | nc $DEST_IP $DEST_PORT -q10
>
> I didn't try this, but they also suggested to use "gzip" between nc and dd
> to compress network bandwidth:
>  - source: dd .... | gzip  -cf | nc ...
>  - destination: nc ... | gzip -dfc | dd ...
>
> Combining them all together:
>  dd if=/dev/sda | pv | gzip -cf | nc $DEST_IP $DEST_PORT -q10
> Should show the rate of the raw data being sent across the network.
>
> Hope someone else finds this useful.
>
> DanL
>
> P.S. I booted from a Ubuntu ISO 10.04 image which has dd, nc, and gzip by
> default - I had to install pv using apt-get IIRC.
>
> --
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