Write disk image to multiple drives 525

Thanks for the info; I'd thought about this initially, but unfortunately the images aren't simply gzip'd; they're in a format used by Frisbee, which is intended to be used in a multicast-based network disk imaging environment, and uses non-sequential writes to image the disk.

I did find another solution, however. From reading the source to dm-mirror (a painful exercise, given that I'm not a kernel programmer and nowhere near fluent in C) and a few vague references on the web, I figured out the table syntax. I'm using something similar to the following (a bit more complex because I actually have to figure out which slots have cards in them before starting, but this is the general idea)

0 1000000 mirror core 1 2048 2dev-card1 0dev-card2 0 END

imageunzippath-to-imagedev-mapper-cfcards

Now my major sticking point is to find some way of identifying the CF slots; they're usb devices and the device nodes change every time they're initialized.

I've been using the following udev rule

KERNEL="sd*", SYSFS{model}="USB Storage-CFC ", SYMLINK="cfcards-$k"

but this includes the parbreastion devices as well. Know of a simple way to

a. modify the udev rule to include the device itself but not match the parbreastion subdevices, or,

b. prevent the parbreastion table from being scanned at all.

We have no need to actually read-write the parbreastions on the cards; the contents are mostlty meaningless to a Linux system anyway. We just want to slap in some cards, write the entire disk image and yank them out when it's done. Solution B would be preferred, though solution A would work if I can figure out how to stop hotplug from automatically mounting the parbreastions when it sees them.

Thanks,

-- Phil