Greetings Forum,
I'm at a loss, in desperation I seek the knowledge of the collective linux user-mind to see if anyone has a direction I should look for the solution.

Here's the setup:

I have several server blades, of various brands, most of which run RAID 1, and a large mission critical that runs RAID 5.

I've got my backups of the production data, no problem.

I really need a bare-metal solution for quick deployment of the OS and config.

Here are the program sets I've tried with no results:

g4l - shows multiple drives with the same data rather than the logical drive that I need.

g4u - same deal

LinMin BMR - horribly clumsy to install and operate, once set up, it finally images, but only grabs a 10mb image (assuming the boot partition) then drops out.

LANdesk Management Suite - Wayyyy to expensive if you only need the function of imaging, had to abort.

CloneZilla - Basically the same results as LinMin

F.O.G. - works GREAT on windows systems, still can't get it to capture those RAID logical arrays

Knoppix LIVE - with g4l shell scripts - basically the same as g4l without, I thought it would work to add the knoppix system's ability to read the logical disk, nope.

So, does anyone know a secret that I've missed with any of these systems? I need to be able to (in the event of horrible system failure) to push the OS to a completely new blade.

PLEASE help!

ahhh my son. you seek mondo


http://www.mondorescue.org/

by bare metal i assume you mean anything you want to install it on.
mondo will allow you to build a server on [almost] any hardware...

Mondo!
It's brilliant! Thanks for your tip. Why I didn't find this program when I was searching for months, I have no idea.

Here is a problem I'm still having.

I'm backing up mostly Centos 5.2 and 5.3 systems.

My goal is an NFS storage drive that holds the images.

I mount that, and it writes the images perfectly to that device.

but, from what I understand, I then burn the first image to CD so I can boot to it to start the restore...

I get a "gap before sda2" error and it kicks into interactive.

Then, it wants me to define the partitions.

If it doesn't do that, Mindi's other issue is no connectivity. It can't see LVM either


Does anyone know of a step-by-step guide that works for CentOS (or redhat or anything similar) I can only find Debian based steps, and I am at a loss in debian-speak.l

I appreciate any help available.


Thanks!