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mondo will do a full image of your drives (including making images of ntfs/fat32 drives). You boot off the image you create with mondo, and you can nuke the machine and do a full restore from cd/dvd, or do a partial restore.

backuppc is perl based and works wonders on a network for daily backups. (you can backup the server backuppc is running on too!)

I keep daily backups with Backuppc and archive stuff to dvd+rw... also I have some dvd+rw so I can do occassional complete backups with mondorescue.

Of course this is all on linux, so if you're on windows, I'm sure there are some backup solutions you get to pay for.

Well, it's for linux, so if you have windows...guess this isn't a solution for ya. Also the GUI isn't much to speak of, but it gets the important stuff done. (And works very nicely as a cron job =)

Try Mondo Rescue / Mindi http://www.microwerks.net/~hugo/

It can create a bootable CD image. Essentially, it can be used to clone/backup a harddrive. I use it to setup a customized distro. Using the recue CD your "install" image can be put on bare hardware and be up in running in less than 20 minutes. If you are using a distro with KUDZU, after the first boot it will recognize your hardware.

I have been very pleased thus far, it has allowed me to build "base" configuration of dedicated servers and quickly migrate data and test new hardware.

-MS2k

Not really, but I do make a standard installation CD of my prefered distro.

I have to manage a lot of similarly configured boxes. I use my favorite distro as a starting point then, trim off any fat/bloat, etc. Add specialized tools, which usually involved modifying some SPEC files for RPMS. to build a new RPM.

Once I get all the RPMs installed and build I remove the development RPMS, and other development tools.

I then run MONDO ARCHIVE http://www.microwerks.net/~hugo/

and build a bootable rescue disk. I then use that disk to quickly deploy preconfigured boxes. Seems like this would work for your firewall needs.

My distro of choice is Redhat, so you'll probably not use that for firewall, but the nice thing is anaconda does recongise a good amount of hardware, so that upon boot it will autoconfigure most hardware if you install the image onto a different machine.

This basically allows me to get a new webserver, with all my custom applications, and configurations from bare metal to running in about 20 minutes. So while it may not be exactly what you are looking for, it may be work for you.

-MS2k

The large company method (Oracle, Borland, of course MS, etc) is probably out. These people will not buy that software from you. From the point of view of the MBA's who make the decision, anything written in a couple of years by a couple of guy's can be replicated (ok, half as good) by 50 Hindi's working for 1% the price each over 4 years, and given that actual software development is like 2% of the company's cost, the uncertainties of buying someone else's software (look at all the time MS has bought software that turned out to be pirated or under the BSD license), they just won't do it. These MBAs veiw you and and anything associated with you as shit and won't give you the time of day.

Now look at the niche market guy, particularly the one to five person shop. In this catagory you have 4 Developers (discriptive name), ACDsee (probably as big as these class ever gets, a 40 person company), Mondo rescue (hey, it's even open source!), Device Logics (milking the last bit of money out of DRDOS with a 3 person company). Folks, as programmers, that catagory is where the money is. Those programmers keep more of what they produce than anyone else in the industry. Their products are cheap, but ultimately the future is a few biggies like Oracle and Microsoft still conning the pointy-haireds who won't buy from anyone else, and a vast class of independent shops. Society will spend less on software, but paradoxically software programmers will get more money, because the vast and oppressive corporate bureaucracies will be starved out.

Those guys will never buy our man's University written software because they can't afford enough to pay the university lawyer's hourly rate while they look over the docs and sign them.

In short, Sean is right and this software will never make money.

UNLESS . . . our man quits his academic job and re-writes this and starts selling it himself. Which is of course exactly what he should do.

Mondo is reliable. It backs up your GNU/Linux server or workstation to tape, CD-R, CD-RW or NFS partition. In the event of catastrophic data loss, you will be able to restore all of your data [or as much as you want], from bare metal if necessary. Mondo is in use by Nortel Networks, Siemens, HP (US and France), IBM, NASA's JPL, dozens of smaller companies, and tens of thousands of users.

Mondo is reliable. It backs up your GNU/Linux server or workstation to tape, CD-R, CD-RW or NFS partition. In the event of catastrophic data loss, you will be able to restore all of your data [or as much as you want], from bare metal if necessary. Mondo is in use by Nortel Networks, Siemens, HP (US and France), IBM, NASA's JPL, dozens of smaller companies, and tens of thousands of users.

Personally, I agree with UDP multicasting being the way for multiple network-based clones... For only a handful of clones Mondo+Mindi might be an alternative, too... No network, but CD-ROMs over sneakernet though... :)

What you're looking for is mondo. We setup machines in a lab on campus using it(29 machines in all). We basically create a standard machine, and then have it generate some cds. You drop those CDs in the new machine, make sure that the partitions it creates are all correct, and have it restore the image from the old machine. Make changes as necessary to the new machine(hostname, address,etc) and you're done. It sure beats dd, gzip and NFS which we did before we found mondo :)
-Aaron

Use Mondo Rescue. It will backup a linux system and restore to different size partitions etc if needed.

If it's the latter, can any of you linux gurus tell me what is the current "accepted" solution for making backups. Not archives or images, backups.

• Backing up without unmounting disks. Mondoarchive does fine with that.
• Altering atimes and ctimes. I haven't checked this so I don't know what Mondoarchive does with them.

If you need periodic complete system backups get some removable hard drive bays, some 100GB disks and Mondo

Mondo Rescue creates a
very nice rescue system. You can choose to
use a special kernel or you can use your own
kernel and modules. Boot from floppy or
CD-ROM. Use Mondo Rescue to create a
a stock mini distro or your hand polished crash
recovery setup or create a backup of your
complete setup on CD-ROM.

It saved my ass more than one time. Since my
Mondo setup reads ReiserFs, I switched my
backup HDs to Reiser too: faster back ups,
better usage of disk space.

Try Mindi. Build your own boot cd or floppy set using your own tools and kernel (option to use Mindi's own "Failsafe" kernel as well.) Uses ash and busybox for lightness. Minimal bullshit needed to use; edit a list of tools to include, then run mindi. A Debian package is available, be sure to edit your tools list (it's pretty lean by default - no fsck!)

You can setup whatever distro you want, disable all the servers but those one you want, and use Mindi-Linux. It uses a skeleton ramdisk and your kernel, modules, and tools to build a boot/root disk set. The first floppy boots your kernel, then loads your modules and installs your tools from additional floppies. Mindi works for almost any Linux kernel or distribution. So you setup it once, and then will be able to make your very own 'Linux -- DNS Server edition' that even your boss will be able to use!