So here's my first attempt at poking around the orbit infrastructure. The goal clone a machine. My candidate is orbit-pc2, one of the user service machines. It's going to be migrated to a dell.

Step 1 —

PXE: This is a concerted effort between the dhcp server and the tftp server. In the dhcpd.conf file in the parameter "nextserver" is interpreted by the pxe booting clinet as "where to look" for the boot img (and associated directive files). The booting clinet then initiates a tftp session with the "next-server" and downloads an directive file that tells it what image to copy, uncompress, and boot.

step 2 —

Getting the boot image:

On the tftp server a boot menu file (I'm going to call it that for lack of something better to call it) is stored in /tfptboot/pexlinux.cfg/ . It contains information on what image to download, and what boot flags to apply to the kernel.

When the booting client wakes up, and establishes a tftp session with "next-server", it looks for a file in the /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg directory that has it's IP ADDRESS as the name of the file (IN HEX, with no field delimiters).

E.G. if your IP was 
10.0.250.246
the file would have to be named 
0A00FAF6

NOTE: The link should point to the boot menu file '''NOT''' the image.

Assuming that the image file and boot menu file are valid, the booting client will boot and eventually put you at a console.

once at the console, the resting place of the image was mounted.

step 3 —

mount -o nolock repository2:/export/orbit/image/tmp /mnt

We need the nolock option because of some NFS bug.
Repository2:yadayada is the NFS destination (where the image will be dumped)
/mnt is my mount point (could be anything really)

So now that I have some place to put the image file, I can create it with the imagezip utility (should live in /bin on the image).

step 4 —

imagezip /dev/hda - > /mnt/orbit-pc1...

imagezip is part of the firsbee suite, it is dumb and will just start dumping to std out. To use it you need to redirect that to a file or some such place. (unix pipe + ssh?)
/dev/hda is my source (where I want the image to come from)
the source is followed by a - for some reason I don't know.
> is the unix redirect
/mnt/orbit-pc1… is my file name (note that I put it on the nfs mounted directory, since the image has no place / space to hold any thing. And even if it did, how would you get at it?)

Assuming that all went well, you should have a file sitting somewhere on some box, that you can get at later.

Now the fun begins. We have and image, it would be usefull to put it somewhere.

Since frisbee is a client / server type service, I'll need a place for the server to run. This place should have access to my freshly generated image. Mogwai (?!$#@) is our candidate. Once ssh'd to mogwai, I'll scp my file from repository2, and place it in /tmp. (an exercise left to the reader)

step 5

frisbeed -p 5050 -m 10.0.250.221 /tmp/orbit-pc2...

frisbeed lives in /usr/sbin. Note the d for daemon.
-p 5050 is the port number for the service (I just picked one at random)
-m 10.0.250.221 is the address of the client. This could be some kind of multi cast address, but to keep things simple I figued I'd just do one machine for now.
/tmp/orbit-pc2 is my image file, freshly copied.

step 6

frisbee -p 5050 -m 10.0.101.10 -i 10.0.250.221 /dev/hda

frisbee should live in /bin somewhere on the winlab.img that we booted into.
-p 5050 is the randomly choosen port number
-m 10.0.101.10 is mogwai's ip (my service host)
-i 10.0.250.221 is the interface I'm trying to use to get my image from. No idea why I need this, but if I don't put it there, it complains about not being able to resolve the host name. ("gethostbyname: Unknown host")
/dev/hda is where I'm going to dump my image. (Hope you don't have anything there you need, it's going to be gone in a miniute).

Start the service first, start the client second. Assming that it worked you should see a progress indicator.