[ excerpt taken from distfile's README ]

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. On newer machines we use PXE to boot a
small system in a RAM disk. From that system we then clone the hard
disks in the machines.

WWW: http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/CoPs/patagonia/dolly.html