> True to some respect - my reason for asking is I need to automate the > "cloning" of Linux images and to that extent I don't want to reinvent
I was going to take the fact that I don't receive the posts currently as a indication to stay out of that discussion, but not when you bring up the point of cloning. Since Mark plugged 'his' redbook today, I can do 'mine' too... I too had the impression and was told by various Linux folks that this was cool because SuSE has it all in rc.config and that makes cloning easy. Well it does not. It has lots of things clobbered all over the place and some parts need to be rebuilt by running SuSEConfig and some are parsed out of this file (go count how many times rc.config is being read and parsed during startup of your SuSE system). To make a redbook short, the rc.config turned out to be a big PITA. If you read the chapter on cloning in the ISP/ASP book you will find the scripts to generate a diff from two installs, and how to turn that into a input for patch to make the 3rd Linux image out of this. While I have not tried for RedHat yet, I am confident cleaning up the patch file is much easier than trying to understand which of all the copies and backup files should be updated or not. Just my 0.02 (we have cents again now, with the Euro ;-) Rob
