I had a lovely Christmas, spent most of the time over at M&D’s eating and drinking too much! I think they’re coming over for New Year’s Eve. We all went out for Chinese on Xmas Eve and I went over to PP’s afterwards.

I got lots of presents including a Senseo coffee machine which I have in my computer room as well as an electric toothbrush, clock radios, toiletries and booze.

I just watched Dorian Gray, which is right up there with Watchmen as the worst comicbook movie ever.

As I’d like to upgrade my PC to Fedora 12, but still need some F10-only applications (NessusClient 4.0.2 for example) I decided to clone it into a Virtual Machine.

I made a basic Fedora 10 64-Bit install under VirtualBox, then rsync’ed the filesystem using variations on the below commands (as root) making sure not to copy over /proc, /sys, /dev, /tmp and so on:

rsync -ap --delete --numeric-ids /sbin/ 192.168.0.133:/sbin/
rsync -ap --delete --numeric-ids /var/ 192.168.0.133:/var/
rsync -ap --delete --numeric-ids /home/ 192.168.0.133:/home/
rsync -ap --delete --numeric-ids /bin/ 192.168.0.133:/bin/
rsync -ap --delete --numeric-ids /lib/ 192.168.0.133:/lib/
....

I modified grub/fstab (screwed up a bit there and had to use a RHEL rescue CD) and ran mkinitrd to remove the encryption, LVM and Vista partition; then replaced the Nvidia drivers with VirtualBox ones, disabled Compiz/screensaver etc. It now works very well, I’ve shrunk the memory down to 1Gb and only 2 cores and the disk only uses about 17Gb. It quite amazing what you can do using rsync on a live system, who needs cloning programs like Acronis/Ghost?

Its the ultimate backup as not only can I simply re-run the rsync commands to keep it up-to-date, but I have a completely running system not just my data, and can move it to any machine I like. I could probably even migrate it back to a physical machine if I needed too.