Slashdot Mirror
Ghost for Unix
junyoung writes "Hubert Feyrer released the latest version of g4u ("ghost for unix"), a NetBSD-based bootfloppy/CD-ROM image that allows one to easily clone PC harddisks by using FTP. Since it reads the disk bit by bit, it can create an image of any operating system and any file system. Besides, it's free (under BSD style license)."
they are using dd as well, just running it through gzip -9 before uploading it to the server (distrib/i386/floppies/ramdisk-g4u/uploaddisk in the source)
From the article:
This form of the BSD license has a minor problem.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The multicast console kicks ass -- I can ghost a tonne of workstations at one time and not kill the network.
Symantecs' support infrastructure is wicked too. We haven't hit a problem that wasn't documented on their website yet.
Also, ghost understands filesystems and not raw blocks. I don't understand why reading the raw data is an advantage -- you get images the size of your hard disk or partition instead of the size of the data. Ghost 7.5 can understand fat/ntfs/ext2 and ext3. It can also do raw reads of the hard disk.
btw, I don't work for symantec.
-- DrZaius - Minister of Sciences and Protector of the Faith
root@localhost$ rpm -qi nc
:
Name : nc Relocations: (not relocateable)
Version : 1.10 Vendor: MandrakeSoft
Release : 15mdk Build Date: Wed 11 Jul 2001 07:30:43 AM PDT
Install date: Sun 03 Feb 2002 01:39:29 PM PST Build Host: bi.mandrakesoft.com
Group : Networking/Other Source RPM: nc-1.10-15mdk.src.rpm
Size : 117756 License: GPL
Packager : Mandrake Linux Team <bugs@linux-mandrake.com>
URL : http://www.l0pht.com/~weld/netcat
Summary : Reads and writes data across network connections using TCP or UDP.
Description
The nc package contains Netcat (the program is now netcat), a simple
utility for reading and writing data across network connections, using
the TCP or UDP protocols. Netcat is intended to be a reliable back-end
tool which can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and
scripts. Netcat is also a feature-rich network debugging and exploration
tool, since it can create many different connections and has many
built-in capabilities.
You may want to install the netcat package if you are administering a
network and you'd like to use its debugging and network exploration
capabilities.
hes talking about netcat, the general purpose network swiss army knife.
you should install it, its probably one of the most useful netowrk utilities ever written.
ex$$
Ghost is pretty slow when reading/writing a raw partition, which is exactly what g4u is doing. Next time you use ghost give it a try and you'll see it's quite slow.
It's less of a big deal than it was, with the new version. Ghost 2003 makes several different bootdisks, including a LanMan client (which can be a PITA for modern NIC drivers) and, IIRC, FTP.
Ghost 2003 also handles local CD-R, USB, USB2 and Firewire disks, and can write an image file to a local NTFS disk, which is a neat trick for a DOS program.
The bigger challenge with the latest version of ghost is remembering where the hell you put the bootdisk you need, since you can't get all the features on the same disk (e.g. no LanMan client + USB2 support).
Ghost is what lets me do other things while I'm at work besides fix PCs.
I license ghost @ something like $11 a copy for all the PCs I'm in charge of, and given the time-savings, it paid for itself in about two weeks.
Still, this looks really good. I like free. I'll probably give it a try next week.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
There is also partition image which is more advanced imo.
I have installed thousands, yes thousands of images of Windows 95 - 2000, as well as restored Windows 2000 domain controllers from backup images with Ghost and Ghost Walker. It works great.
Thanks for playing.
All you have to do is run 'sysprep' before you make your images. Makes it pretty easy from there.
"In a cat's eye, all things belong to cats."
We've been using it to clone our NT based workstations at work for some time now and it kicks ass! It copes quite happily with NTFS(!), FAT16/32, Ext2/3, ReiserFS etc etc...
It's a client/server program and they provide a bootable ISO image on their site (saves you having to create one if you're lazy like me) ;). You can also compress the image taken using either gzip or bzip compression.
To clear up any misconceptions that the sarcastic parent comment might have created:
GPL gets around this by asking that you give them the copyright and give them all the credit leaving you with none.
Actually, every author of a GPL program gets credit. The GNU GPL, section 2, requires that "You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change." Thus, the credit stays where it belongs, in the source code, documentation, and (for interactive programs) the about box, rather than in possibly unrelated advertising.
Will I retire or break 10K?
There's a similar project, called RECCD toolkit, but it places the hard drive image onto a CD, rather than over a network. It's great for backup and use in computer labs.
http://www.bablokb.de/reccd/index.html
[A file made of all zeroes] should leave us with very compressible freespace, right?
I suggested a repeating pattern rather than zeroes because some UNIX systems represent an all-zero file cluster by not allocating the cluster at all. A file that contains such a cluster is called a "sparse file".
Will I retire or break 10K?
1. slow: yes. It reads the whole disk and compresses it, then when it's moved over the net it's decompressed again and written back to disk. Esp. compression is very slow, at deployment the bottle neck is somewhere between disk and network.
The only way to work around that is to add some intelligence WRT file systems, which is exactly what tools like ghost etc. do. g4u does not do so to remain simple, and be able to clone _any_ operating system or combination of operating systems. See the web page for more background!
2. bit corruption:
do you trust your harddisk to give you back the bits you hand it over? I do, and if we can't do that one day, we all have a problem.
- Hubert
I can see no discernable difference between this and any bootable Linux CD with 'dd', 'gzip', and 'nc' or 'ssh' installed. The reason people buy Ghost is that it resizes partitions, and this doesn't have any of that.
Am I missing something? Is there something on their page that I didn't see as I read through? Is there a demand for new and unfamiliar commands for doing familiar things?
This is not a troll - this is honest curiosity. I've used Partition Image, which is similar, and don't use it for pretty much the same reason - nothing added. On the other hand, I've used multiple bootable distributions (linuxcare, superrescue, @stake) to make disk images using dd/gzip/nc/ssh/md5sum. Cake.
Udpcast handles any filesystem just fine. Indeed, it reads directly from the device, and is thus able to handle even filesystems that are not supported by Linux. And in order to handle the case of "almost empty" partition, it supports compressed transfers: the empty, zero-filled sectors compress to almost nothing, and thus don't consume any bandwidth.
Say no to software patents.
Try udpcast. It supports multicast and has boot floppies. I use it to replace ghost on a 40 computer lab. Supports stdin and stdout multicast so it's easy to use in many different cases. I'm working on boot disks that only require one disk for each client.
They can use different compression schemes to trade off space vs the size of backups. They already offer gzip and bzip2, I think, so lzop should be easily added - that is very quickly compressible and decompresses obscenely fast, several megabytes per second on a P133.