[nycbug-talk] dd /dev/null before imaging disk

[George Georgalis]

On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 02:23:37PM -0400, George Georgalis wrote:
>Before imaging a disk, I've been in the habbit of
>
>dd if=/dev/null >/usr/zeros ; rm /usr/zeros
>
>etc, for each partition, and from a mini-root cdrom, whatever.
>The idea is to make the media contain the most compressable bytes
>possible. Then I dd the entire disk to bzip2 and save the output
>to my image file.
>
>I assume this works, I have come up with some rather small image
>files.
>
>So now I want to image an NTFS XP install, is there any good and
>easy way to write out zeros before I image?

...so I tried setting up an apache alias.

Alias /zero "/dev/zero"

but I seem to be missing some magic. tried playing with the asis
handler, and even 

 AddType application/octet-stream zero

but I'm not getting more than a zero byte file....

Any ideas on what I can do to apache to 'spill the beans'?

// George


-- 
George Georgalis, systems architect, administrator <IXOYE><