Thread: Snapshotting a system?

I am in the process of setting up 15+ machines in our network where all the machines are identical to each other where there are no difference between them. The problem is that I feel it being time consuming to setup the same setup on all machines since I will be spending at least an hour or two per machines which can turn out to be a very long setup process.

I am quite sure this should be possible but I have no clue of how to snapshot a system and deploying this snapshot on a clean ubuntu installation, does anyone with a kind soul have any takes of how I should go on with "cloning" a setup and then push this setup to the other machines?

Basically I was hoping that my deploying process would look like this:
Install ubuntu on all machines
Configure one machine with the base configuration and packages I need.
--> push out this setup to the rest machines.

Any takes on this?

I have done some googling and found Clone Zilla but it seems too advanced for such a small task... could Partimage possibly do the trick? psychocats.net/ubuntu/partimage

You need to use "provisioning software" to load Linux or UNIX like operating systems automatically with actual operating systems, device drivers, data, and make it ready for network operation without any user input. See conman software list here:

Top 5 Open Source Linux Server Provisioning Software

Thanks for the prompt response once again nixcraft.
I have however decided to go with a much easier solution for those who have the same question - and since the machines have identical type of hardware I decided to go with the approach of simply creating a tar ball of / and then transfering it to the machines I wish to have the same setup on; and there I just untar it and change the IP/hostname(etc) to fit that machine.

You could also use clonezilla, it's opensource imaging software. Where you can make an image and store it on server(samba/nfs) and let all the machines connect to that share and load the image onto the pc's.

You can also use remastersys for a ubuntu system build

Remastersys Homepage

Hi Driller,

Can you help me with the steps you are following?

-Ashish