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systemimager can be used to clone lots of machines and they can be configured to reinstall daily

http://wiki.systemimager.org/index.php/Main_Page

I don't know the exact setup of ADS, but Linux clusters do auto-image all the time. There are plenty of tools for that. SystemImager probably does what you want.

For the whole Exchange server / Sharepoint thing, you're going to pay or you're going to opt for the "free for education" Google Docs.

Open Admin is an extremely mature school management package, and SchoolTool is an up-and-coming one, but school reporting requirements are so strict that many packages won't pass muster.

This kind of migration is extremely difficult and I think you're making too light of it.

"Hey, X can be used in illegal ways, therefore we should make it illegal!"

Let's see, that can apply to everything from raw sugar to automobiles. Quick, file legislation to make them all illegal!

Compromised Windows systems are being used to flood the internet with spam in violation of various state and federal laws. Outlaw Windows!

Why cant these congresscritters get it through their thick skulls that there are plenty of legitimate uses for P2P, even in a university environment. A university in Holland is using bittorrent to manage 6500 workstations and it's saving them time and money. The university I work at uses SystemImager on its high performance research cluster to manage the software on all the compute nodes. SystemImager supports the use of bittorrent as a transport mechanism. If these aren't legal, legitimate, and highly useful implementations of bittorrent then I don't know what is. These are just two working examples of P2P being used in university environments in responsible ways, but I'm sure those stuffed shirts in Washington could care less.

We use http://www.systemimager.org/ for this. Desktops get installed via PXEBOOT and DHCP for their identity and mount homedirs and other data via NFS. Nightly updates (via rsync controlled by SystemImager) keep all the desktops identical. If someone installs something it just goes away at midnight unless the image is updated. Logins are OpenLDAP/Kerberos.

This works fantastically well.

I've used SystemImager to do this for small clusters before. It works great. I'm sure it could scale up to quite large installations.

Another option would be run your own local package repository, and push all changes out via package upgrades. These could be applied automatically on some set schedule, if desired. Or just do remote management via ssh or somesuch.

Using custom Knoppix CD's and using unionfs to save local changes (e.g. home dir) to a flash drive or something might also be interesting.

I'm only talking about Linux here, of course. I care less and less about Windows every day.

Personally, I'm a linux guy. But when I've got to image windows, I use their sysprep tools from the resource kit cd's, and then use ntfsclone from the ntfsprogs package to do the actual backup and restore.

Conceptually, the whole thing is easy. Sysprep removes the windows registry identification, device map, and just redetects them upon first boot. However, theres a few steps you'll need to do after restoring from sysprep, but you can automate them. Things like having a random hostname generated for you. OK, not the best - so I make cygwin part of the image, and hack up some bash script to do a reverse DNS lookup on the localhost IP (from static MAC based DHCP lease), and have it rename itself using the netdom tools. Agh... oh yeah, so you pretty much need cygwin to automate your imaging process if you're going to use sysprep. Given enough time you can make it smo~oth, but you gotta sit down and hack it.

And if this was linux, I'd say use SIS.

--
RTFM, cause bitches love dat shit.

You could find some techniques to install a Linux system automatically on a lot of computers at http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Debian/kickstart.html

Copy'n'paste:

Kickstart is a Red Hat package that deploys Red Hat to multiple
installation targets with minimal customisation. SystemImager is a
third-party tool that does a better job. http://systemimager.org/

fai (fully automated install) is a Debian-based tool to do likewise.
http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/ Like System Imager, it's
suitable for building clusters.

Replicator is similar. http://replicator.sourceforge.net/ It tries to
do some customisation for differences in hard disk sizes, video cards,
etc.

Partition Image is a semi-automated tool for replicating a Linux
partition to multiple targets. http://www.partimage.org/

(Of course, you can also use an LNX-BBC maintenance disk and "dd"
or dump/restore images. Pick your poison.)

Restoring from rsync would require you to create the partition, format the partition and the restore the files.

Yes, it's written for Linux, but it wouldn't be difficult to update it to work with NetBSD or any other OS. The reason it's Linux specific is that it makes some efforts to customize the image to match the destination machines.

Also, if you need the MBR...

As the article says, this is drive imaging whereas rsync is file copying.

The big advantage to making images with dd or a similar tool and using that is that 1) it can deal with raw partition formats, where you can't just mount them -- I guess this would be useful for a Tivo, or maybe for an Oracle database (but in that case, you'd be better off using the Oracle backup utilities) or 2) If you had an application that required that files not move around on the disk (pretty much unheard of in *nix, but somewhat common as a copy protection on Windows) dd'ing images would be better.

Overall, I'd think that rsync would be a lot better, and while Systemimager isn't perfect, it's architecture is pretty sound and I'd start there.

Installing and administering the various open source tools can be tedious work, especially without documentation of how to put things together.

A quick Google search though reveals a lot of free papers and manuals on this very topic.

The solution: Linux. Not in a thin client situation, but re-syncing each night with systemimager.

The X startup files are set to erase the home directory and replace it with the prototype copy every logout, which means guests can even use the hard drive for temporary storage.

KDE is in Kiosk mode, just to prevent shell access and simplify the interface. Since the home directory is erased at logout, the user is perfectly free to configure Firefox (or whatever other app) however he wants, because it only affects that session.

We've got OpenOffice as well as Crossover to run MS-Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

It's Debian stable with a few backports, and it's extremely low maintenance.

If anything breaks, stick the "Fix It" floppy in, it formats the hard drive and transfers everything over. The other day I swapped out a dying hard drive, let it boot from the floppy, and the machine was up and running again. 5 minutes of work.

I'm using SystemImager and it works great. It's basically rsync with extra trappings to make this easy.

If you're looking for a "Ghost" like solution, try SystemImager. Should work well if your hardware is fairly standardised.

in japan and it seems like america is still asleep and in a good mood so I'll search for you.....
I thought I read once that ghost creates its own partition and then boots to that and downloads the image. So booting a minimal install of linux mightn't be much different...so.... Ghost for Unix
Something called system imager
A thread about ghost alternatives for linux
cluster cloner
cluster cloner
tired of a href'n:
http://www.microwerks.net/~hugo/about/about.html
http://www.jpartner.com/documentation/platform/lin ux/ghost2.htm
http://216.239.57.104/search?q=cache:4-QzyNsabRYJ: xpt.sourceforge.net/techdocs/linuxdisk/Tools/linux disk09.000.html+ghost+linux&hl=en&start=5&ie=UTF-8
dunno if any of those help or not

systemimager.org does this as a package. There is a bit of learning curve... but that curve is shorter than getting 400 machines loaded by hand :)

in addition, do not forget about systemimager. It provides an easy way to install configured images across the network (using PXE or CD or floppy). Very handy... I have used it to load 20 servers at a time, and the tool allows for post-install configure scripts, so that individual boxes can be configured differently during the load. Very handy for large installs, and I think the sun tools (although more mature) are less configurable.

Isn't Linux supposed to be GPL? Make copies for each system. Oh, but Redhat could be adding in special non-GPL applications (it's not a violation of the GPL to run a non-GPL application on a GPL OS). And I presume they are adding in support. Do you really need that support? Why not download Debian or Slackware, install a system and configure it as you like, and then duplicate it to all your servers. Then if you need a special non-GPL application, buy it for just the servers you need it. Of course if you need that application on every server, you're probably in for a lot of cost, anyway.

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned SystemImager. If you haven't looked at it for maintaining large numbers of Linux boxes, scamper off and take a look now. It is worth your time.

Now, that being said, I recently had the opportunity to evaluate using a number of OpenBSD boxes, but I couldn't find a utility for maintaining a bunch of the boxes in the same manner as SystemImager (i.e. Incrementally update servers from a golden master via rsync).

So, has anyone run found anything that does what systemimager does, but that is cross-platform? Do any SystemImager developers out there want to comment on the potential difficulty in supporting other-than-Linux operating systems in SystemImager?

SystemImager is one of the most useful tools I've ever seen, however, I believe that it would be an enterprise "killer app" if it could do MacOS X, *BSD, Windows etc.

-Peter

All three of the issues you mentioned had been solved long ago in open source, in ways quite possibly superior to MS's solution. Open Source offers standardization and compatibility - you can deploy Suns next to PCs and know right away they'll talk to one another without spending a lot of money on consultants and third-party solutions to put the pieces together.

Manageablility is really a non-issue. Just because you don't know the tools doesn't mean they don't exist. Look into debian's apt-get. Set up a local repository, and have all 20,000 clients ping the server every day or so for updates. Bam, probably get patch deployment down to 10 man-hours of work. System imaging is easier under linux too. Take a look at System Imager; tools like it mean don't have to jump through the hoops you do with preparing windows images.

As far as accountability goes, that's why you get a support contract from someone like RedHat, who can provide enterprise level support for you. The contracts aren't expensive, but like you said, neither are MS's.

I'm going to have to call you on expenses, at least on the server side. Yes, client-side MS may be a bit less expensive at this point, but that's due to the fact that Linux doesn't have the broad base of users that MS does at this point. You can use the same hardware; Dell and the like already sell preconfigured Linux boxes, so I don't know where you're getting that hardware costs are more. Once you factor in retraining, user expenses would probably be less. Linux has far better tools for user administration and reconfiguring. Take a look at LDAP and name service switch, they provide all the tools of Active Directory, plus are based on open standards, which means that compatibility costs are lessened.

• system imager
• OSCAR
• System Instalation Suite:>

We have about 50 Debian boxes, all installed with Systemimager. Basically, it uses EtherBoot to load a kernel/initrd over the network, then uses rsync to do most of the heavy lifting. We had to make a few local customizations, but it has worked quite well for us.

System Imager can be used to automate remote installs, updates, software distribution and data distribution.

To configure the system after the software installation there is System Config which integrates into System Imager.

I fail to see what is impressive about this.
It looks like the wheel reinvented several times.
For cluster installs on several machines, use system imager .
For using and controlling a cluster of machines for various taskes, use LSF .

The number of machines is pathetic too ... 225 @ 733 mhz? That makes it to #325?
How sad. I need to bench mark our render farm (200+ boxes, 120 are dual 1ghz) and see what we can come up with. I know it is higher than that... and we have a smaller install for the industry.

I looked for info to spec our machines but I couldn't find any info.... any help?

I would use systemimager to install a full linux image on the machines. I use it for our cluster and it works great.
www.systemimager.org

It us understandable to be surly sometimes.

I help admin a couple Irix labs and four Linux labs. For the Linux labs, we've been using VA's SystemImager.

We basically do a kickstart install of RedHat 6.x, then call 'updateclient' with the proper options to grab the image from our server. SystemImager is a big Perl script that uses rsync to pull files across the network. It's quick and it works 99% of the time. We've done quite a few machines, and we are doing a couple more labs worth in August. I am the 'image builder guy,' so I get to assemble and test an image, break it, bend it, and, when it's ready, I upload it for our labs to share. When the labs are ready, we pull the image down onto a few test machines, and if everything goes right, we do the rest. It's a simple process that is easily scriptable, and you only have to maintain one image for all of the machines.

All of our machines are EXACTLY the same, though, so if your machines are different, you could run into problems. We've had very good luck with it, and I would recommend it to anyone doing a big Linux rollout.

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Ryan