Re: [tlug] Tip of the Day: "ghosting" a machine with nc and dd

[Attila Kinali <attila@example.com>]

On Tue, 17 Jul 2007 20:22:56 +0900
tlug@example.com wrote:

> (This was back in the days of kinput2, of course.)  

Hey! I still use kinput2 at times, when scim fucks up completely :-)

> One more note: I usually specify the block size when I use the dd command.
> 	Example: dd bs=1MB if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
> Note that the MB multiplicative suffix is the hardware definition of megabtye 

Depends on what hardware. If you talk about telecommunication hardware,
then yes. If you talk about data storage hardware then it's 1024².

> (1000*1000, not 1024*1024), which is what you want when you use dd on hard 
> disks.  See `man dd` for details.
> 	http://linux.die.net/man/1/dd

Nope. With disks you want multiples of 512 bytes (sector size).
With linux doing the disk handling you want multiples of PAGE_SIZE
(which is 4096 on most plattforms). So, use "1M" instead.

			Attila Kinali

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