Since I wrote the post ‘Clonezilla‘ in January, our blog has been getting a lot of hits, apparently from people looking for advice on how to set up Clonezilla. This is understandable, since DRBL (of which Clonezilla is just a piece) is a complex piece of work, with loads of possibilities. So I decided to write up a small HOWTO, a quick and dirty method of getting Clonezilla up and running.

Before I go on, a bit of a disclaimer: Following the instructions below may not provide you with results that fit your particular needs. If you have specific and detailed requirements, see the DRBL documentation. If you would like to hire LightCube Solutions to provide assistance in setting up a Clonezilla solution for your organization, send an email to info@lightcubesolutions.com.

The Steps

1. Install Linux

You’ll need a Linux machine to run your Clonezilla services. These instructions were successfully tested on Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10 and Debian 5. DRBL will also run on Fedora.

2. Install DRBL

First off, open up a Terminal. In Ubuntu and Debian, this is located in ‘Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal’. If you have sudo configured, you can change to super-user access by typing:

sudo -i

Otherwise, use the root password with the following:

su -

Next, add DRBL’s GPG key to your system:

wget http://drbl.sourceforge.net/GPG-KEY-DRBL
apt-key add GPG-KEY-DRBL

Update your apt configuration so that you can install software from the DRBL guys:

cp /etc/apt/sources.list{,.bak}
echo "deb http://drbl.sourceforge.net/drbl-core drbl stable" \
  >> /etc/apt/sources.list

Finally, install DRBL:

apt-get update
apt-get install drbl

3. Configure a Network Alias

DRBL requires that you have two network interfaces. We can get around this by adding a virtual interface:

cat >> /etc/network/interfaces << "EOF"
auto eth0:1
iface eth0:1 inet static
   address 192.168.222.1
   netmask 255.255.255.0
EOF
ifup eth0:1

To verify that you have set up the alias properly, type:

ip addr show eth0 | grep eth0:1

You should see something like this:
inet 192.168.222.1/24 brd 192.168.222.255 scope global eth0:1

4. Configure Your New DRBL Server

Run the following two interactive commands (note that this will require an internet connection and may take some time):

/opt/drbl/sbin/drblsrv -i
/opt/drbl/sbin/drblpush -i

Congratulations! That’s it, you have a DRBL/Clonezilla server ready to create and deploy custom images. All you need to do to start cloning is run:

/opt/drbl/sbin/dcs

Then, boot up your client machines using PXE. See, that wasn’t too painful…