I have 2 nodes (10.04LTS). I have resized the source node to '12000 MB' with the destination node showing 14GB free, yet whenever I try to clone I am told that there is not enough free space.

Source:

# df -m
Filesystem           1M-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda                11812      9453      1999  83% /

Destination:

# df -m
Filesystem           1M-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda                15875       389     14842   3% /

Moving disk images around in the linode manager would require unallocated disk space (not allocated to a disk image), not free space inside a disk image. It looks like your destination linode is a 512 with a 16GB disk image, which means you've allocated all space.

You'll need to shrink the disk image on your destination linode to free up enough unallocated space.

So the process:

1. Create a new node, edit the profile to make sure you build a small disk.
2. Make sure your source disk image size fits into the available unused space.
3. Clone source to destination. This will create another device on the destination node.
4. Boot up destination node, mount cloned image to edit hosts and network (static IPs).
5. Edit node profile, marking cloned image as the root device to boot from.
6. Reboot destination node.

Writing it out, they all seem like obvious steps. Don't know why I didn't grok it first time. Any hints or suggestions where I might have missed something?

Normally when cloning a linode, most people would leave out the second half of step 1, and step 4. Most people use DHCP for IPs, so it's just a matter of, create a new linode, clone the old one to the new one, boot it up, make any configuration changes as desired.

If you've used static IPs, then yes you'd have to edit the IP before booting the copied partition, but you can do that with finnix to avoid having to deploy a new distro and worry about disk image sizes (all you'd need to worry about is source <= destination)

I do have static IPs. I tried setting finnix as the boot device, but got an error (paraphrasing) "node cannot boot for unknown reason".

I think maybe if I were to start again, I would build a node that was easier to clone

Build servers like nature builds organisms: from a set of instructions. Puppet, Chef, DevStructure, etc.

-rt (don't think about what pollen really is)

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