[ale] resized partitions

[Brian]

Preston Boyington wrote:
> i just used Gparted-Clonezilla livecd to change up my partitions on my
> debian laptop and I am absolutely blown away.  after days of backing up
> my files and whining about how i needed to do it (always finding some
> excuse NOT to), i stumbled across this livecd and decided to finally
> bite the bullet.
> 
> http://clonezilla.sourceforge.net/
> 
> i am in the middle of testing it on some of my other project boxen, but
> i feel like a kid with a new toy.  definitely a program that i will keep
> handy.

I tried installing Clonezilla and DRBL on Ubuntu recently to do 
multicast system image deployment. Things didn't always work properly, 
the scripts provided to manage DRBL masked what was actually happening, 
and the documentation was poor. Maybe if I had more experience with 
network booting or more time to troubleshoot I would have been able to 
get it working reliably.

Instead, I put together a few bash scripts that used parted, partimage, 
and several other tools. I put the scripts on a cd along with 
SystemRescueCD (http://www.sysresccd.org/), a small Gentoo-based live-cd 
that includes a great selection of text tools (as well as a few 
graphical ones like Gparted) for system repair. In addition to including 
all the software I needed for both the imaging client and server, 
SystemRescueCD was easy to remaster 
(http://www.sysresccd.org/Sysresccd-manual-en_How_to_personalize_SystemRescueCd)

It wasn't as fast as multicast would have been, but the scripts worked 
reliably and let us crank out a lot of machines at the recent 
installfest for the USSF. If we had kept our system image around 550mb, 
instead of transferring it over the network we could have burned it on 
the same disk as SystemRescueCD, which would make the proces even faster 
and simpler.

The scripts and documentation are at 
http://polibyte.com/wiki/CategoryImaging .

-Brian