Dolly is used to clone the installation of one machine to
(possibly many) other machines. It can distribute image-files
(even gnu-zipped), partitions or whole hard disk drives to
other partitions or hard disk drives. As it forms a "virtual TCP
ring" to distribute data, it works best with fast switched
networks (we were able to clone a 2 GB Windows NT partition
to 15 machines in our cluster over Gigabit Ethernet in less
than 4 minutes).

As dolly clones whole partitions block-wise it works for most
filesystems. We used it to clone partitions of the following
type: Linux, Windows NT, Oberon, Solaris (most of our machines
have multi boot setups). We have a small (additional) Linux
installation on all of our machines or use a small one-floppy-disk-linux
(e.g. muLinux) to do the cloning.