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)."

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Alternatives

[Huff]

When i was reading the article i was thinking 'why do we need another bl**dy disk copier/ghoster/whateverer' But the link states that it can be used with all file systems, which is something i have yet to see in other utilities.

Good on the chap who wrote it.
I definantly will be using this in future.

Huff

Exellent!

[muixA]

The thing I dislike the most about Norton Ghost, is hat it's DOS based. Getting networking working, for SMB image transfer is not always easy...

Cloning PC-Unix boxes (Linux, etc), doesn't really require any special software though... When I need a new node for our EDA cluster, I boot tomsrbt, and run fdisk, and then kick off a script that pulls down an .tar.gz, and takes edits various /etc files to change hostname, IP, etc. Chroot, run lilo, and your done.
--
Matt

Only if it's the same size disk

[j3110]

If the target is 1 sector less, you aren't going to be able to use this tool. I still think tar and netpipes is the only way. (unless you use XFS, in such case the best way would be xfsdump, tar, and xfsrestore) I'm trying to write a multicast fileserver for just this purpose. I have a lab of hetrogeneous machines(I take what I can get from the university) that need to be clones(btw, don't forget to run lilo if you use tar/xfs, and don't forget to change the site-key for ssh). I'm ending up using a homebrew solution. There are other good ghost utilities out there that boot from a cdrom(BART perhaps isn't bad), but I still need my own custom solution because I'm not gonna be here forever to make this lab work, and it needs to be "put this in the floppy drive and select options from the menu" easy.

Huh?

[FreeLinux]

Ghost handles all file systems as well. They call it a sector by sector disk copy. In this case Ghost does not care what is on the disk, it copies the DISK rather than the filesystem or partition as it does by default. But as with g4u you can't resize and so forth with a sector by sector copy.

The only problem with Ghost is the licensing cost.

Re:Cold feet

[wfmcwalter]

I'd be interested to see if anyone can justify this, I just don't feel overall comfortable with the concept of UNIX cloning.

Okay, here's a few, and there's many more from whence these came:

1. You're the lab manager for a large university. You just bought seven hundred identical PCs. You have one week to install a customised kernel, a variety of applications, and lots of site-specific settings onto each machine.
2. You're the above lab manager and several hundred of those machines will sit in a public lab with no grown-up to police them. Experience tells you that student pranksters will do stuff to these machines on a pretty regular basis. Each student is supposed to keep all their work (on an ongoing basis) purely on their network-mounted directory. So you want to periodically (ideally nightly) have the machines return to a known software state.
3. You're the lab manager for the QA department of a large software company. A lot of the tests that the testers perform involve installing new software, performing the necessary patches - these must be performed on machines with exactly the correct software setup, otherwise the test is invalid. Generally, running each test takes less than an hour. You don't want testers sitting waiting for their (rare) test machines to reinstall any longer than absolutely necessary.
4. You're the production manager for a large PC company. You make production runs of thousands of identical machines each day. Time is short, and the production engineers won't let you specialise a given harddrive on the line until its actually inserted into a machine (very common), so you want to very quickly have production machines netboot and pull down their software image. Every minute a machine spends on the production line cost the company a dollar.