Nathan A. Keirn wrote:
A few weeks ago at the Wednesday meeting we had a brief discussion about
needing the enterprise edition of Norton's Ghost utility. I thought that
there has to be a solution for this that is free. I stumbled across this
link with almost no searching, but I know it is not exactly what we are
looking for, but here is the link http://www.redhat.com/advice/tips/. Now
why can't we write a shell script that copy's a windows hard drive image
stored on a server to the requesting computer when it pxe boot's? I am no
programming expert, and I don't know how pxe requests work, but this should
be relatively easy, free, and honest! Anyone else interested?
Nathan
Well, in principle, what ghost does is very easy to do with free utilities. dd
and netcat are all you really need. I've even seen copies of netcat hacked up
to support multicast, just like ghost does. It's not too tough to image a
system and all.
What Ghost does that is a bit more complex is the windows specific stuff. NT
puts some globally unique stuff on the system. There's an AD serial number, the
system CD key etc. Ghost knows how to change all this to make sure that when it
clones a system, the systems don't get confused when they're put on a network
(and are all nice and legal if you have per-seat licensing). Obviously, this
stuff isn't needed with Linux: nothing HAS to be unique, and stuff that it
"helps" to have unique (like the hostname) can be trivially changed (usually
just by modifying a simple file in /etc, or even assigning it via DHCP if the
system is configured to accept such a change).
In other words, imaging Linux systems: Easy. Imaging Windows systems: Not so
easy. Surprise anyone?
--MonMotha
