Our beta-test kiosk-workstation is now tested and so this system is ready to clone to our other workstation.<\/p>\n
The following procedures take off from where, in my previous article<\/a>, I created a tar backup of system root filesystem (i.e. ‘\/’).<\/p>\n In the mean time, the buzzard<\/a> learned how to attach a physical disk<\/a> to a VirtualBox<\/a> VM<\/a>.<\/p>\n This will be useful, because I can clone directly to a harddrive and boot it in a VM to test and configure, and then pop the HD into the physical machine, thereby minimizing downtime of the target workstation, with one less step where things could go wrong.<\/p>\n I start by creating a VM with my physical disk attached, and pxe booting it from my CentOS 7 kickstart<\/a> server.\u00a0 My kickstart configuration<\/a> partitions the physical drive with a boot partition,\u00a0 and an LVM<\/a> PV<\/a> with a VG<\/a> on the remainder of the physical drive, from which I carve a small LV,<\/a> onto which I will install a minimal bootable OS<\/a>, which, as I will show, comes in handy as I get the cloned system up and running.<\/p>\n After the kickstart installation, I reboot my VM into this minimal CentOS 7 and I carve off another LV into which I will untar my clone backup.\u00a0 This will become my new, cloned, slash (\/) filesystem.<\/p>\n (I prefer to create my LVM volumes small, because I can easily grow them later, as needed.)<\/p>\n I now need my backup tar file.\u00a0 I have copied it to my VirtualBox host machine and I will use the VirtualBox file share feature to make it accessible from my booted VM.\u00a0 First I need to install VirtualBox Guest Additions to enable this feature. and then create my vbox share in the “devices” menu.<\/p>\n Now I am set to untar:<\/p>\n The –numeric-owner flag prevents tar from resetting file uid and gid numbers as it does by default, by matching names from \/etc\/passwd and \/etc\/group.\u00a0 These would then no longer match after I reboot into the cloned OS.<\/p>\n Now I need to make changes in my boot partition so that I can boot my newly cloned system.\u00a0 This will require recreating \/boot\/grub\/grub.cfg and also \/boot\/initramfs-*.\u00a0 In particular, the existing initramfs<\/a> contains references by UUID<\/a> to the kickstart-installed root filesystem (what was installed on the currently booted (\/) root partition) and so , short of cloning the UUID, it is tied to that partition.\u00a0 In my previous article<\/a>, I took a quick-and-dirty shortcut around this problem by untar<\/a>ring the cloned system onto, and thus overwriting, that existing root filesystem, so that I could reuse the existing initramfs as-is.\u00a0\u00a0 Now, instead, I am going to fully recreate that initramfs, starting by chrooting<\/a> into the new root filesystem.<\/p>\n#mount a physical disk\r\n VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename \"<\/path\/to\/file>.vmdk\" -rawdisk \/dev\/sda<\/pre>\n
[root@C7-64-minimus ~]# lvcreate -a y -n avrootvol --size 20G -v vg_01\r\n[root@C7-64-minimus ~]# mkfs.ext4 -L avsysroot \/dev\/mapper\/vg_01-avrootvol\r\n[root@C7-64-minimus ~]# mkdir \/mnt\/avrootvol\r\n[root@C7-64-minimus ~]# mount \/dev\/mapper\/vg_01-avrootvol \/mnt\/avrootvol<\/pre>\n
[root@C7-64-minimus ~]# mkdir \/mnt\/shared\r\n[root@C7-64-minimus ~]# mount -t vboxsf Shared \/mnt\/shared<\/pre>\n
[root@C7-64-minimus ~]# cd \/mnt\/avrootvol\r\n[root@C7-64-minimus avrootvol]# tar xzf \/mnt\/shared\/2018.06.19\/av301_root.tgz --numeric-owner<\/pre>\n
[root@C7-64-minimus avrootvol]# mount --bind \/proc .\/proc\r\n [root@C7-64-minimus avrootvol]# mount --bind \/sys .\/sys\r\n [root@C7-64-minimus avrootvol]# mount --bind \/dev .\/dev\r\n [root@C7-64-minimus avrootvol]# chroot \/mnt\/avrootvol\r\n bash-4.2#<\/pre>\n