Hi admins,
As we can create flash archieve on solaris with flarcreate command utility,
so is there any utility like this on Linux to create flah archieves ??
Google tells me:
Jun 22, 2010 ... Live Upgrade (LU) and Flash Archive (Flar) are both essentially big ass wrapper around CPIO, and neither do anything that seems particuarly ...
www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=245
Actually i found a utility called systemimager to create images, but its third party tool.
Is there any native OS utility that can be used for imaging purpose..................any command or something like flar??
zip, tar, cpio, ar . . . .
nothing native. the closest thing would be dd but it does not work like flar does. not sure if there is an similar option in kickstart to Solaris jumpstart. system imager does work well for this. there are other packages you can use to.
Slightly off topic:
This blog entry is actually partially outdated, Jun 22, 2005, not 2010. Current Solaris 10 flar archives support PAX format and inclusion of ZFS pools in addition to CPIO. Note also that the flar technology didn't make it to Solaris 11 Express outside Solaris 10 zones creation support.
Flar was designed to allow cloning systems by creating a bootable archive, Solaris 11 way to do that is the new distribution constructor. 1.Introduction to the Distribution Constructor (Oracle Solaris 11 Express Distribution Constructor Guide) - Sun Microsystems
So, is a flar more than a copy of a file tree? Are there magic files in there from raw devices or the like?
In addition to the plain files, there are several other sections (metadata).
There is a description of the format in the manual page:
man flash_archive
Cute, extract config to xml for things not easily installed as files. So, did it ever get released in open solaris code? Do we need a flar for LINUX? What does LINUX have for flar and jumpstart sort of capabilities?
flarcreate being a shell script. The tricky part is the OS installer. OpenSolaris/Solaris 11 doesn't use support flash archives outside for creating Solaris 10 branded zones.
[install-discuss] How to create flash of opensolaris
Sure, that would be useful.
[databases-discuss] Cloning / Backup of Solaris 10 Server
kickstart is the jumpstart closer application.
About flar, the trend is p2v (physical to virtual) tools that are available with virtualization software.
Physical-to-Virtual - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Well, one significant different from an archive is the bootable part, somewhat like executble zip, but at a much lower level.
It'd be neat if you could make it with the assumption of Internet access for the "off the shelf" bits, and so much smaller and faster! Or, set up a clone server and have a mini-copier to boot on the new machine and suck down copies from the source machine through an intranet connection, perhaps compressed and secure.