RE: Installing a "copy" of an installation on a new computer

["Buchbinder, Barry (NIH/NIAID) [E]" <BBuchbinder at niaid dot nih dot gov>]

Olle Olsson sent the following at Monday, March 08, 2010 3:46 AM
>Have good installations of cygwin on some computers. But these were
>manually setup using the interactive cygwin setup tool. Always forgot to
>install a couple of packages.
>
>Can a fresh install be made using an existing installation as template?
>Is there a way to use the contents of an existing /etc/setup to
>download/install on a fresh machine. Or something like that.
>
>That is, I want to do download/install in a more programmatic way, as an
>alternative to a binary copy machine-to-machine.

You might think about just copying c:\cygwin.
  - If the receiving machines have the same disk drives as the master, you
    won't need to change /etc/fstab.
  - If any environmental variables were set in Windows on the master machine
    they'll need to be set on the cloned machines.
  - Ditto with anything in the registry.

I use mirror.exe <http://home.cs.tum.edu/~jain/> to copy from C:\cygwin on
my desktop to H:\cygwin on the network, which I use when logged in remotely.
Then I use mirror.exe it to copy from H:\cygwin to C:\cygwin on my laptop.
Once I got the environmental variable setup, I just have to be careful to
replicate customizations made on the laptop to the desktop before I run the
batch file that calls mirror.exe.  However, one can tell mirror.exe to
ignore directories like c:\cygwim\home.  And of course, you don't want to
have cygwin processes running of the executable involved are being updated.

As a variation, one might copy with xcopy (which I seem to remember has some
advantage over mirror when dealing with read-only or system attributes.) and
then run mirror to delete files that have been removed from your source.

Here's what I run.

@echo off
xcopy c:\cygwin\*.lnk h:\cygwin /d /s /v /c /i /f /g /h /r /k /y
mirror c:\cygwin h:\cygwin -if=directory_to_ignore -if=ignore_also

IWFM.  YMMV.

Good luck.

- Barry
  Disclaimer: Statements made herein are not made on behalf of NIAID.



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