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I've been searching for a way to make this process easier.. I have a project where we have to configure 1200 RPI's exactly the same.. Obviously I don't want to clone each card one at a time I'm trying to find the best solution.

We do have access to a multi card writer but I've also seen people say that the multi card writers will only copy files and not the image.. are there any ways to duplicate the img in bulk?

Monergy
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  • Many decades ago I used to sell software on cassette tapes. This was tedious, so I wrote a program to automate it. In your case I would construct something with a compressed image which could be copied to a normal SD card, which could expand itself on the Pi. NOOBS may be a starting point, as it does something similar. – Milliways Apr 26 '14 at 22:53
  • That is interesting.. I've not done anything like that before but will research it further... that does seam to make the most sense.. then I can use the duplicating machine too.. – Monergy Apr 27 '14 at 00:58
  • Somewhat related. I have a similar setup, but needed to distinguish them somehow. You can readout the Pi serial-nr. Those numbers are unique. – Gerben Apr 27 '14 at 14:29
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    Since you need 1200 SD cards you'll probably have 1200 Pis. Why not have a stack of them do the writing. Just have some scripts to auto start when a SD card is insterted. And maybe light up an LED via the GPIO when it's ready to had the SD card swapped for a blank one. – Gerben Apr 27 '14 at 14:42
  • Gerben... that is a great idea and one that I wondered if I could do.. I'm not quite sure how to make them into a a writer? Can they drive themselves or would each need to be connected to a computer? – Monergy Apr 27 '14 at 19:05

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I once had a chat with some guys who knew far more about this than me, so I can't give very good directions, but in general here's what they suggested.

SD cards are pretty flexible in terms of what can read/write them. I believe they said that could essentially get it down to single wire type communications, which you could then multiplex. So you'd write up an Arduino or something that would read one block off a source SD card, and then write it simultaneously to like 12 cards.

Fair warning though, this was a fairly theoretical conversation over tea and biscuits, I'm not really sure this could be done, but I don't know enough to say for certain.

Fred
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Probably not the solution you're looking for, but have a look at booting the pis from a NFS share over ethernet.

see here for example: http://www.whaleblubber.ca/boot-raspberry-pi-nfs/ the main steps include creating a NFS share on your server, copying your SD's content over to the share and then configure your cmdline.txt:

root=/dev/nfs rootfstype=nfs nfsroot=<nfs-server-ip>:/nfsshares/rpi,udp,vers=3 smsc95xx.turbo_mode=N ip=dhcp

This way you can just copy the configured share, but copying 1200 'images' á 2gb requires ~ 2,5TB drive space...

You can also boot the Pi in read only mode - this way you could run all of them from one image (share), depends on your project and needs.

also a lot of cabling and ethernet switching... ;)

Gotschi
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