Clonezilla Workshop@LinuxTag 2013

Part of the routine work for a system administrator is to do system deployment or recovery. Clonezilla is designed for this scenario, and is licensed under GPL. It is similar to Symantec Ghost or Acronis True Image. The file systems supported by Clonezilla are:

1. ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux
2. FAT, NTFS of MS Windows
3. HFS+ of Mac OS
4. UFS2 of BSD
5. VMFS3 and VMFS5 of VMware ESX
6. Minix of MINIX

Therefore you can image or clone GNU/Linux, MS windows, Intel-based Mac OS, FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD, and VMware ESX. LVM2 and hardware RAID device are supported, too. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla SE (Server Edition). Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. While Clonezilla SE is for massive deployment, it can restore many computers simultaneously. Clonezilla is not only for a newbie system administrator, but also for a veteran.

This 2-hour workshop will cover some of the scenarios which an administrator might need, and we will use slides and virtual machine to do the live demonstration. The scenarios will include

1. Disk image saving and restoring
2. Disk cloning
3. Unattended recovery CD or USB flash drive
4. Massively creating bootable USB flash drives on a single machine, e.g. this use case.
5. Pre-process and post-process when restoring a system
6. Unattended recovery with an file server (Samba server, ssh server, or NFS server). Files: demo-6.txt, isolinux-demo-6.cfg
7. A customized live CD for remote troubleshooting in Clonezilla live environment. Files: demo-7.txt, isolinux-demo-7.cfg
8. Serial console and PXE booting usage. File: demo-8.txt