SUMMARY: Cloning a Solaris Machine

Thanks to the many replies.

A few said use Flash Archive the current system, and use Jumpstart to 
restore it to the new H/W.

Others said use dd command to copy the entire contents to the second 
drive. Then run installboot on the second drive and it will be an exact 
block for block copy of the root drive in the original server partitions 
data and all.

Others said use ufsdump and restore onto the new disk and do a 
install-boot on the new disk.

Unfortunately I don't have the luxury of taking down the machine I want 
clone. Even if I did it doesn't have any free drive bays.

Dave.

Below is my original question

I have a Solaris 8 NIS+ server I'd like to clone to
an identical hardware/disk drive platform to use in case
the primary server fails. Can anyone suggest the best/easiest
solution to do this?

Some things I've thought of are using

rdist
Solaris Flash Archive

I'd like the cloned system to become the master system
once I change it's hostname to that of the master if it
should fail.

I do already have a NIS+ root replica but I'm finding that converting
this to a root master is somewhat involved.

At the very least, since I have an identical hardware system to that
of the NIS+ server I'd like to use it with an alternate method
of cloning the master.

My plan at the moment would be to install the same release/version of
the Solaris OS that is running on the master, in this case Solaris 8
10/01 onto the cloned system. I'd also create the disk partitions
exactly the same. At that point I'd need to clone the data from the
master over to the clone using one of the above solutions or some
other solution.

Thank You
Dave Martini
LLNL
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