If you need to do images of lab computers, with network multicasting,
etc.
check out labexpert, from www.altiris.com.
We use it for our labs 'round here. It does IPX/IP multicast, remote
reboot,
hidden partitions to boot from(don't need boot floppies), centralized
database
that can be used to download a given image to a pc based on ethernet
address,
updates netbios names/print queues/NT sids based on that centralized
database,
etc.
The 3.x versions basically just need a network share
(novell,smb,whatever) to
be accessible from a minimal dos boot (comes with licenses of Caldera
OpenDos).
The newer versions require an NT workstation to control the download
process
which is a drag, but the upside is it more easily does download
scheduling.
We use Novell Servers (3.12 and 5.0) as our download sources mostly
because
the dos-based IP smb support sucks, but also because we've never seen
anything
that can move files from drive->net faster than NW3.12(on equivalent
hardware).
The 4.0 version of labexpert is starting to have netboot stuff, and
we're
experimenting with that using linux as the dhcp/tftp/smb boot servers.
(when you
netboot, you can use the in-rom pxe boot environment to download your
images
so you are free of the extremely bletcherous MS workgroups client for
dos).
Labexpert relies on Imageblaster, a dos executable that does the actual
'read drive into file across the network' and 'download image file and
multicast to other stations' tasks. It can do truly nice things with
FAT volumes (we blow down 8gb fat32 volumes with 1.8 GB of data in them
to
31 machines in ~10 minutes on a 100btx switched network). It can copy
any
partition or even whole drive, but there are certain shortcuts it can
take with file systems it understands(Fat,Fat32, maybe now NTFS) that
vastly speed
things up. You CAN get some of this speed on other file systems by
making
sure that unused space is contiguous zeros, which compresses well.
At this time we don't use it for ext2 file systems.
Richard Harvey Chapman wrote:
>
> On Tue, 23 May 2000, Richard Harvey Chapman wrote:
>
> > IIRC Ghost and ImageCast are one and the same. Ghost was bought and
> > renamed.
> >
> > but I've been wrong before.
>
> I guess I'm wrong. (just checked www.storagesoft.com)
>
> R.
>
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Sam Bayne - System Administrator
North Seattle Community College
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (206)527-3762
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