Tips for reducing image size?

[matthewadams12]

Hi all,

Note: I’m a fog noob.

Using fog server to PXE boot ubuntu server onto PCs. I noticed that when capturing an image of my base ubuntu server, the image ended up being quite large because of the 256Gb SSD that I installed the OS on. This is basically a vanilla ubuntu server OS with no additional software on it, so it seems to me that most of the space on the /dev/sda3 (the largest partition) is empty. I’m noticing that it’s taking a while to transfer the image over the LAN, and I’d like to speed things up.

Is there a way to have fog reduce the size of the image, given that so much of it is empty space?

If not, what tips or tricks do you suggest to achieve the same result? Like maybe, before capturing the image, resizing the main partition from 250-something Gb down to the smallest size for the OS to fit on?

Also, if I do that, then deploy the image to a PC with, say, a 1 Tb drive, will I have to resize the main partition after deployment, or can I tell fog to use all available space?

Thanks,
Matthew

[Sebastian Roth]

@matthewadams12 It depends on the partitioning and filesystems used. If Ubuntu is installed with LVM it will be captured sector by sector (large). But if you choose plain GPT or MBR partitioning FOG should be able to capture the used space only.

[matthewadams12]

This post is deleted!

[matthewadams12]

@Sebastian-Roth Thanks. Worked like a charm. Went from ~250Gb image down to ~9Gb.