I'm currently working on a system quite similar to what you just described.
I work for a computer training company that has many computers, that are
accessed throughout the day by different people, and the way the courses
are setup, we cannot restrict users at all, (can't learn if they can't do
it right?) so as you can imagine, the computers are constantly being
screwed up. ;)
What we have come up with is something similar to Ghost, or Imagecast, but
is meant to run on every reboot. (This may not be often enough for you) We
have a 25meg Linux partition on each computer, that boots first, runs Rsync
to update the files from the server, then modifies the MBR to boot windows
immediately afterwards. When windows boots, it modifies the MBR to boot
Linux next time. We also have created a Windows Registry editor for Linux
that allows us to use the same set files on practically any hardware setup.
This seems to be the key feature most, if not all the other "imaging"
software is lacking. An important one for us too, as no two computers we
own have exactly the same hardware.
We update about 1.5gb of data each reboot, currently we use the --size-only
switch to speed things up, with that switch the entire process (from
rebooting Windows, to being back in Windows) is about 5 minutes. If we take
that switch off, its unfortunately about 25mins. We will be looking to
modify Rsync to speed this up tremendously over the next few months. (most
likely code caching in to Rsync, which sounds like that may solve your
problem, but this wont be for a while)
This probably wont be a viable solution for you, but come to think of it,
we created a little program a few years back that might just do the trick
for you. Its a dos program similar to Rsync, (lacking checksums though)
that compares files by access times, modify times, file sizes, and
attributes. We haven't used it for a while, but I know it took about 1-2
mins to compare 1gb of data, we could supply you the source code as well if
your interested.
If anyone else is interested in either of these solutions, email me
privately for more info on the programs themselves.
At 02:18 AM 7/4/2000 +1000, you wrote:
>Hi folks,
>
> I'm reconfiguring a lab full of Win95 PCs, and I've been
>experimenting with rsync as a way of maintaining their integrity.
>In the past, we've used a thing called rdist-win95 (which is no
>longer supported) to resynchronize the machines with a master
>image each time a user logs on. This worked OK, but had its
>quirks. Now I'm looking for something new. I've considered
>converting to PC-RDIST, but I'm put off by the price.
>
> I've gotten the rsync for win32 that was kindly compiled
>by Mike McHenry (http://rsync.samba.org/rsync/nt.html) and I've
>been experimenting with it. I have a "hidden" (to explorer)
>partition E: with a copy of the contents of drive C:, and I can
>successfully use rsync to synchronize the two. But it's slooooooooow.
>With rdist-win95, it took a few seconds to check to see if anything
>needed updating. With rsync, it takes 5 minutes or more. This
>just isn't acceptable for something that runs in a login script.
>
> One difference between rdist-win95 and rsync is that
>the former maintains a database of times, sizes and checksums from the
>files in the master image. This helps make things faster, but I
>don't think it accounts entirely for the speed difference. (The
>image, btw, is about 500 MB.) Can anyone offer any suggestions
>for speeding up rsync in this situation, or recommend any other way
>of (cheaply!) doing fast integrity checks at each login?
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Bryan
>
>--
>===========================================================================
>====
>Bryan Wright |"If you take cranberries and stew them like
>Physics Department | applesauce, they taste much more like prunes
>University of Virginia | than rhubarb does." -- Groucho
>Charlottesville, VA 22901 |
>(804) 924-7218 | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>===========================================================================
>====
