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)."

Comments

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

Re:Alternatives

[alsta]

As previously mentioned, copying bit-by-bit is something Ghost already does. The problem, and ultimately unfeasibility with this utility is that it DOESN'T recognize filesystems and structures.

That means that you can only restore an image to a disk in equal or larger size than that of the dump. It also means that if you have a larger disk you'll find that you'll end up with unused space or perhaps worse, a boot sector in the wrong place so that you can't even boot your system.

I do believe that this project has the ability to go further at some point, but right now, I see it as a NetBSD boot floppy with network drivers and a ramdisk which has dd(1).

Re:Alternatives

[BlueUnderwear]

But the link states that it can be used with all file systems, which is something i have yet to see in other utilities.

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.

Does anyone have first hand experience?

[FreeLinux]

I'd really like to know what the performance is like. Ghost can be very fast sometimes.

It's too bad that it won't allow you to resize partitions, as you can with Ghost but, it looks like a great start, so long as it isn't too slow.

Re:Does anyone have first hand experience?

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that you don't consider reading raw data from a partition to be a practical purpose shows you've never worked in IT.

This type of program isn't marketed towards the standard computer consumer, it's marketed towards server operators and up.

g4u source code mirror

[vidnet]

server.sh:
cat /dev/hda | nc -l -p 5030

client.sh:
nc server 5030 > /dev/hda

Re:g4u source code mirror

[ceswiedler]

I sure hope you don't have /dev/hda mounted when you do that. Do you have a spare Linux boot drive on every computer you want to ghost? It can't be just a separate partition, since you're copying the entire physical drive.

Re:g4u source code mirror

[DrZaius]

tar with the appropriate flags works much better. Also, if you run it on a system that doesn't write to the disk much (ie webservers) you can generally take a somewhat reliable backup without taking the system down to init 1.

Re:g4u source code mirror

[Smthng]

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.

Re:g4u source code mirror

[taviso]

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.

Re:g4u source code mirror

[zrodney]

one of those bootable unixes or rescue cdroms would be fine. they run the os out of the ramdisk they copy during bootup.
That leaves the hda free to be repartitioned, etc.
I'm pretty sure that's how the orginal author intended

Re:g4u source code mirror

[toast0]

you do know tar can be configured to store and set creation dates while creating and extracting archives?

Re:g4u source code mirror

[BlueUnderwear]

server.sh:
cat /dev/hda | nc -l -p 5030

client.sh:
nc server 5030 > /dev/hda

This works fine, as long as you have only one receiver (client). No imagine a school who wants to image a whole classroom of 25 machines at once. Your solution will consume 25 times the bandwidth, because it will open 25 point-to-point links!

A better solution would be to use udpcast which uses Ethernet's multicast abilities to allow all PC's to be loaded from the same stream of data.

Re:g4u source code mirror

[ameoba]

Some sort of multicast is almost neccessary to compete with Ghost. Outside of the single-machine HDD backup realm, the lack of multicasting abilities is going to kill this; I can't imagine imaging a decently sized network without it.

Re:g4u source code mirror

[Dwonis]

Just mount your filesystems as read-only, then run dd. Of course, if your pipe gets interrupted for some reason, you're screwed, but otherwise, it should work fine.

Re:hmms

[Student_Tech]

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)

Make that "old skool BSD license"

[yerricde]

From the article:

3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement:

This product includes software developed by Hubert Feyrer .

This form of the BSD license has a minor problem.

Re:Make that "old skool BSD license"

[Arandir]

If those notices are regarding the Regents of tht University of California, then they have already been rescinded.

Re:Make that "old skool BSD license"

[clifyt]

Yes, that is a major problem.

GPL gets around this by asking that you give them the copyright and give them all the credit leaving you with none.

I **HATE** when someone wants credit for the stuff they've created. The nerve of them. Especially after telling you that you can do anything you want with the software only you better give credit where credit is due.

I'm glad you cleared this up for us so none of use that restrictive BSD licensed crapware.

PS. This ain't a troll or funny. Its fucking sarcasm.

clif

Re:Make that "old skool BSD license"

[ianezz]

This ain't a troll or funny. Its fucking sarcasm.

If the FreeBSD team didn't decide to change licencing, every single advertisement (including banners, for example) of FreeBSD would have to exhaustively elencate all of the contributors, thus making any sort of advertisement pratically impossibile.

Mr. Huber Freyer can get away advertising his work without much hassle exactly because he doesn't have also to list all FreeBSD contributors (since they changed their mind).

Requiring due credit is fine. Pretending to have your name to be written even on your distributor's underwear is definitively too much, and this is what the old advertising clause basically asks for.

Re:Make that "old skool BSD license"

[ianezz]

Addenda: to furtherly demonstrate how silly that clause is, I'd also want to point out that while Mr. Huber Freyer requires his acknowledgement to be displayed in all advertising material, he is not displaying anywhere in his page the required acknowledgement (as the NetBSD license still requires) regarding the University of California, but simply tells his software is based on NetBSD.

Now: is he giving due credit? Yes. Is he doing it in the form required by the NetBSD license? No. Is that clause silly? Yes.

Re:Make that "old skool BSD license"

[StormReaver]

"GPL gets around this by asking that you give them the copyright and give them all the credit leaving you with none."

The GPL does nothing of the sort. Nowhere in the GPL is the request made for contributors to sign over their copyrights. Just the opposite is true. Contributors retain copyrights over contributed code that is their own creation. The GPL states that contributors of derivitive code must grant others the full right to copy, modify, and distribute those derivitive contributions. That's it.

You are probably confusing the GPL with the FSF's advice to assign it the copyright to your GPL'd code that you wish to have legally defended by the FSF (under the assumption that you are not financially able to enforce your copyrights yourself). Nowhere is this a requirement.

Likewise, there is no provision in the GPL to strip you of credit for contributions you have made. Once again, quite the opposite is true. The GPL goes to great length to make sure you are properly attributed and that recognition for your contributions is not usurped.

The GPL has been carefully crafted to protect the rights of authors without imposing unnecessary burdens on contributors of derivitive works. The only inconvenience I have ever noticed with the GPL was experienced from a proprietary software perspective. And that was a primary purpose of the GPL: to make life difficult for those who want to steal the works of others, while making life easier for those who want to build upon the works of others and contribute those improvements back to the world.

The GPL works wonderfully and is a thing of beauty.

Re:Make that "old skool BSD license"

[kevin lyda]

wrong.

on the off chance you stuck a reading lamp up your ass before planting your head in it...

first, the gpl does not require you to assign copyright to "them." what you probably mean is that the fsf *REQUESTS* that you grant them copyright to gpl'd software (you still retain your own). this way if someone violates your copyright, you can tell the fsf and they'll go sic their lawyers on the violator. the courts won't listen to the fsf if they don't haven't been assigned status by the authors. likewise, lawyers are expensive so the fsf is doing you a *FAVOUR* by offering to do that for authors of gpl'd software.

secondly the gpl requires authors to maintain credit within source files. not advertising, but credits in the source files have to stay.

Re:Make that "old skool BSD license"

[Paul Jakma]

hmm.. no..

the FSF could quite easily task their lawyers to help GPL copyright owners pursue cases irrespective of whether the copyright owner is FSF or original author. I cant think of an actual valid reason why FSF would require copyright assigned, other than the idealogical reason that if copyright is held by FSF the original author can not dual-licence the code anymore and develop a proprietary version.

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

Re:Exellent!

[slaker]

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.

This is very nice

[K8Fan]

Ever since Symantec bought Ghost, they've been changing it from a simple, easy to use, small, beautiful and most of all SMALL utility to a typical bloated pile of junk. It's so nice to see someone develop an open and free version that recaptures the original idea - just copy the fricken hard disk already!

Re:This is very nice

[tcc]

> Ever since Symantec bought Ghost, they've been changing it from a simple, easy to use, small, beautiful and most of all SMALL utility to a typical bloated pile of junk

Actually, you could say that about just EVERY product they've bought, EXEPT ghost.

The executable still fits on a 1.44MB diskette with MSDOS bootable files, and has a LOAD of features for the size.

I don't care about the TAR or tape driver portion of it, but I sure do care about the splitting, compression, encryption, being able to read the god damn compressed/encrypted/segmented file WITHOUT having to reghost it back to a hard drive in case I need a single file, I love being able to ghost directly to CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, to another machine or straight to a win2k server with ghost enterprise) exept that this portion is more or less good because of the fact that you need a dos packet driver and it causes a PITA with modern networking cards. I love the fact that it even worked with my 1.2TB raid (yeah, just for testing :)), it proves that the code base is solid and WORKS, all the features WORKS, they don't have crap like product activation, they aren't being lame about expiry or whatever other PITA software come with. This tool is one of the few that I'd put on EVERY sysadmin desk.

Okay it's not free, but it sure isn't overpriced compared to office suites or some other software out there that are doing far less and are in no way near as reliable as Ghost is. It pays for itself. Now if you want to compare this with a unix variant, be my guest, I have nothing against competition, but I sure do have something against +4 insightful comments based on something thrown in the air without substancial evidence. This isn't Norton Internet Security or Personnal Firewall that we are talking about (yes they really killed Atguard with this pile of ... ).

The only thing I'd complain about ghost is that it's still dos based. I'd like to be able to have a hotswap IDE bay and keep my Win2k machine up and plug the drive, ghost it, move the file to my datacenter, and unplug without having to reboot or anything, that would be great, right now I use a testbench for this and it's still good enough for my needs, and saving me a LOT of time.

Re:This is very nice

[Blkdeath]

Ever since Symantec bought Ghost, they've been changing it from a simple, easy to use, small, beautiful and most of all SMALL utility to a typical bloated pile of junk. It's so nice to see someone develop an open and free version that recaptures the original idea - just copy the fricken hard disk already!

That's all well and good, until you need to take an image from a 6GB test machine and put it on one lab of 10GB machines and another of 4GB, with a couple 3.3 and 8.4's thrown in for good measure (you don't always get the same size drive back for an RMA, for one thing). Sending an image to a batch of brand-new workstations involves the following steps;

1. Image one workstation. Ghost automatically resizes all partitions to fill the HDD. (Potentially as large as, say, 80 or 120GB)
2. Update all installed drivers.
3. Create new image on server.
4. Batch-load image to all new workstations.

The prospect of either manually resizing, or dumping and re-creating several partitions is a headache I'd much sooner live without.

Creating and maintaining eight identical workstation images with the only difference being the size of the HDD costs a lot of time (money) and server storage, not to mention far too much administrative overhead. If I want to image 100 workstations, I'd prefer to associate them in LCCM and instruct them to 'go', or tell the Ghost MultiCast server which workstations to image and have it fire away. Running 6+ multicast sessions either takes six times as long, else runs at 1/6th the speed.

It's lunch-hour, you have to have 75 machines re-imaged and useable by the end of lunch. Choose your application wisely.

Ghost's ability to back up a workstation onto CDR discs (@ 650, 700, or 800MB) which can be booted and restoring your disk in one easy shot is also a fantastic feature. Backing up a laptop to a connected USB HDD is another example of phenominal functionality.

G4U seems like a nice novelty, and perhaps a good way to back up your home workstation, but I don't forsee it ever replacing even a small portion of Ghost's utility.

Paramount

[Trusty Penfold]

Ghost is a trademark of Paramount Pictures

You should do a trademark search at the patent and trademark office before releasing infringing software.

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.

Re:Only if it's the same size disk

[BrookHarty]

Hey dont knock Barts boot disk. Its rather nice to have a boot floppy(or cdrom) that will boot almost any nic card. Top it off with Ghost i can backup/restore my laptop and workstations over IP. And dealing with partitions not whole HD's make it easier to move OS's around.

Hey, and SSH with barts disk works great, thou you miss multiple ttys.

Re:Only if it's the same size disk

[j3110]

oh, I wasn't knocking bart :) It's great for what it does. It just wasn't made for what I need to do :) I considered patching bart to do it, but decided to just use nfsroot so I wouldn't have to make an endless supply of CD's :)

If you are looking for a single machine or small numbers of machines to do backup and restore, bart and g4u are great! I used g4u when my lab was homogenous, and it was perfect. I still need multicasting and tar or xfsdump support that is user friendly. It's best I write my own :) Then I can use it as example real world multicasting code for classes as well.

Re:Only if it's the same size disk

[G27 Radio]

If the target is 1 sector less, you aren't going to be able to use this tool.

This is true, but if the target is larger you're still OK. I've never used the Unix version, but the DOS version would restore to a larger target with no problem, except that the extra sectors on the target would remain unused. In other words, it's not necessary to have identical drives in both systems. Just make sure that your source image is < or = to the target drive.

Re:Only if it's the same size disk

[g4dget]

This is true, but if the target is larger you're still OK.

Not necessarily: if the drive geometries differ, you may well be in trouble.

Re:Only if it's the same size disk

[G27 Radio]

Not necessarily: if the drive geometries differ, you may well be in trouble.

Speaking from experience, this never caused us a problem. Granted, all the machines we cloned used FAT partitions (they were all NT and OS/2 machines--we're talking about 4 years back.) No, we didn't use NTFS or HPFS on workstations because we needed to be able to access the files from DOS in the event that the OS got fubared. I can't say for certain how drive geometry would affect other types of OS's/filesystems.

Re:Only if it's the same size disk

[evilviper]

If the target is 1 sector less, you aren't going to be able to use this tool.

Not true. I've used UDPcast to take an image from a larger hard drive, and stick it on a smaller one. An FSCK is in order, but it still works. Of course, you can't transfer to a disk that is significantly smaller without problems.

I still think tar and netpipes is the only way.

No way. That means you have to manually partition the hard drive. You have to run mkfs/newfs on each of the partitions. After transfering the data, you must then make it bootable by installing lilo, grub, etc.

In addition to that, you are transfering everything unicast... That means the time to setup multiple stations increases linearly... For more than a handful of workstations, you're going to need to have them offline for a hell of a long time.

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

Bah... BART is a waste of space. There are two good options out there right now. One is PARTIMAGE, which works like ghost (it understands most filesystems, and only copies the useful data) or UDPcast which coppies the raw hard disk, but it sends it to other machines in multicast, so you can copy a hard drive two two machines as quickly as 2,000. UDPcast also has the ability to compress the data, so you send data a fraction of the size of the hard drive.

Partimage only works client-server, but UDPcast gives you a choice... UDPcast is meant to be run from floppy to floppy, but I was quickly able to rig a real server for it (instead of going to/from /dev/hda, it goes to/from a generated filename). Throw a menu on it, and you're set. Of course, you could set aside a machine (from each group of similiar machines) to be just the source all the time, and not used for anything else...

What we really need, is PartImage with multicast support... Either using UDPcast or (preferably) netcast (which is smaller and more portable). That would result in something that puts Ghost to shame, even if you disregarded the price of Ghost. That was something I was planning on hacking together, but I no longer need it, so I don't intend to do it myself.

Re:Only if it's the same size disk

[j3110]

That only works with ext2/3 filesystems. Most ppl don't use those anymore. You can however resive the fs before you do such evil to it and it work, but it's still not useful in a hetrogenious network.

If the disks are different sizes, you should partition them by hand (or set a script that uses %s).

There are multicast netpipes out there :) You can use |gzip -c| to compress data, and you can use xfsdump/restore to work with active systems.

I want to write my custom solution because then the client can just ask the server for which files are available and which groups are available and I can maximize the network utilization (just have a computer join a group and catch it up to the others while the others are throttled only if the network has been saturated.) Lilo can be configured in the script, but I prefer a block transfer of one single ext2 boot partition to the beginning of the drive and have the mbr boot that partition (set it active and use the default mbr). No problems there either. There's a lot of neat stuff I could do if I wrote my own solution, and I really just want to play with things. I've already learned a LOT about multicasting doing this (like windows machines don't support the spec properly... suprised? no, I didn't think so).

In the end I may end up with a boot floppy version, but size isn't important to me. That's why I'm playing around with it in Java :) I know it's goofy, but it's more just me playing to learn than an actual need. I want to play with gcj too, so we'll see how that turns out :) I know, I could have done it in C and put it on a floppy, but it's just more fun trying to make something wierd like that work :) Besides, it's for a school lab, there is a lot the teachers/students could learn about Java, multicasting, linux, xfs, gcj, etc. If I did C, that would be one less thing for them to learn since they already know C/C++. Few professors and students know much about java. Besides, I have a point to make about Java being good for embedded systems. I started with Lejos (java for lego bricks that I talked them into using for AI). I may try to use J2ME and put it on that open source RTOS kernel Jaluna (it has J2ME support). If J2ME and Jaluna support multicasting (Jaluna and J2ME is supposed to be able to take libraries you need and add them to the installation.) If you are counting here, now they have to learn RTOS kernels, embedded systems, and J2ME. It's a school, they'll get more than they bargained for and the end solution will be user friendly and well documented. Maybe they'll learn some UI design and good documentation habits.

In other news...

[kenthorvath]

...RMS is set to release gnu4u, "GNU's Norton Utilities 4 Unix". Wow...

Re:In other news...

[Graspee_Leemoor]

" ...RMS is set to release gnu4u, "GNU's Norton Utilities 4 Unix". Wow..."

Ugh, RMS in a pink shirt and a smile. Thanks for sticking that image in my brain.

graspee

speed increase?

[zoombat]

I've never used g4u personally, but I did some research on disk cloning back awhile ago and a common complaint about the software was that even though it was rock-solid for all kinds of different operating systems, it was really slow. Anyone have any idea how reasonable the speeds are now?

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.

Ghost is worth the money

[DrZaius]

I think it's worth it to pay for enterprise ghost and the win2k box it needs to run on if you really need ghost.

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.

Re:Ghost is worth the money

[Ektanoor]

Well I once tried ghost and sincerly it was a great product. But since Symantec bought it, I forgot about that thing. Because Symantec wacked it to the impossible. After a few tries I dropped any idea to use the product altogether. And one of the problems was with multicast. It would die after some minutes and leave all stations in a dead end. Besides, on multicast, I couldn't ghost a tonne of workstations. Yes, could ghost a lot more than unicast but not a tonne.Well if Symantec solved these problems, then, I'm happy for them. But it is not good to make much hype of it. Ghost was a great product, probably still is a great product. But it is a product that it is oriented in one of the most critical segments of the market. Hypes here are too bad.

Yes, it is good that ghost understands filesystems. But it is also good that ghost would work nicely on raw data. Why? For forensics, to copy unmovable data (in relation to the disk itself), to mirror disks where data is partially damaged. At the time I tried, Ghost was "acceptable" on this level but it had some problems.

Anyway, for those who would like to work nicely without caring for many hassles about how these things work, ghost is probably the best choice.

Re:Ghost is worth the money

[megaduck]

Also, ghost understands filesystems and not raw blocks.

Without question, this is one of the coolest features of Ghost. Without it, g4u isn't even an option for me. I work in an educational environment where we're using the same images on four different hardware configurations with a bunch of wildly different HD sizes. We're already stretching the capacity of our Ghost Servers (yep, plural. Three sites.). Needing a different image for each type of HD would require Terabytes of additional storage, not to mention increase our administrative overhead by an order of magnitude.

I've never seen a production environment where all the HDs were identical. Because it understands files, Ghost can deal with the real world in a clean and elegant manner.

Until g4u understands filesystems and supports multicast, it's not even worth considering for most scenarios.

Re:Ghost is worth the money

[BlueUnderwear]

The multicast console kicks ass -- I can ghost a tonne of workstations at one time and not kill the network.

Yeah, but Linux tools such as udpcast can do this too, and much faster as well (70 Mbps on a 100 Mbps network!)

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.

Point granted. However, udpcast is able to compress the data from the disk before it sends it out to the network, thus mitigating the effect of "almost empty" partitions. Those unused sectors will most probably be full of binary zeroes, which compress to almost nothing.

Re:Ghost is worth the money

[karlm]

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.

If your machine has been broken into, you want to save the entire hard drive image, including "blank" space verbatum for forensic purposes before you wipe the disk and reinstall everything.

Also, what if you're runnig *BSD, Solais x86, or you're using xfs, reiserfs, cramfs (on a flash drive or microdrive)? Spritefs and lfs give you better write performance. I hate to break it to you, but 4 filesystems may not cover everyone's needs. Alse, there's the issue of encrypted partitions. (Not the file-level encryption that ships with windows now, but real partition-lelvel encryption.)

If you put raw disk images back on the disk you have the advantage of overwriting the old file data instead of just marking the blocks as unused.

I'm sure that for most windows shops, Ghosts does everything they want and is fact more useful than opaque data transfer. However, don't be so quick to dismiss the advantages of raw partition transfer and storage.

Low level error correction

[yerricde]

isn't there a big chance that some bits would get corrupted?

Modern storage devices use error correction at a very low level. For instance, CD-ROM has three error-correcting codes: two in the CD layer and one in the sector layer. In addition, a partition could be written to multiple discs in a manner similar to RAID 5, such that every fifth disc stored an xor of the four previous discs.

Ghost doesn't work with non-PC's...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever try using Ghost on a Sparc station? Ghost can't handle any file systems at all if they aren't sitting on x86 hardware, which is a problem g4u can solve. So that's two problems with Ghost.

Re:Ghost doesn't work with non-PC's...

[FreeLinux]

Plug your Sparc disk into the SCSI controller of an Intel box and Ghost can image it just fine. However, you are correct, having a native Unix version is good.

Wipe every free block for great compression

[yerricde]

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.

Shouldn't matter. If you have wiped your drive's free space (trivial; use a program that creates thousands of 1 MB files filled with a repeating pattern) first, an "image the size of the hard disk or partition" will compress much smaller.

Ghost 7.5 can understand fat/ntfs/ext2 and ext3.

But does it grok ReiserFS or any of the other more obscure filesystems in use on servers?

Re:Wipe every free block for great compression

[g4dget]

use a program that creates thousands of 1 MB files filled with a repeating pattern

"cat /dev/zero > junk; rm junk" will do the trick (if you don't believe me, try it).

Good for clusters

[whovian]

Thank you thank you thank you!!! I am just about to install a cluster, so instead of installing RedHat for the nth time, I can make all the nodes' disks off-site -- and probably while unattended somewhat -- and then bring them in, pop in the drives, and go.

Re:Good for clusters

[hubertf]

Yeah, have fun with that, no prob!
I did a 45-machine cluster with g4u, see
www.feyrer.de/marathon-cluster/ :-)

(Of course the machines were running NetBSD too, doing a video rendering job)

- Hubert

Re:Good for clusters

[delong]

Why not use a disk duplication machine?

Not trying to be smart, just suggesting.

Derek

Partition Image

[tseng_mike]

There is also partition image which is more advanced imo.

Re:Partition Image

[chrysalis]

I second this.

Partition image is also nice as a rescue disk.

Re:Partition Image

[whovian]

Advanced in that you can clone a parition instead of the whole disk? Yeah, that's useful. But as the docs point out, partition image requires an already existing partition to write to. g4u doesn't seem to care about what is on the target drive; it will just overwrite sectors.

Re:Partition Image

[Bronster]

But as the docs point out, partition image requires an already existing partition to write to.

Here's a fragment of the script I use for this purpose...

# Prepare the disk
/bin/dd of=/dev/hda if=/dev/zero bs=512 count=1
/sbin/sfdisk /dev/hda < partitions.sfdisk
# wipe the start of the DOS partition as well
/bin/dd of=/dev/hda2 if=/dev/zero bs=512 count=1
# and mark the boot record properly!!
/bin/dd if=mbr.dd of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1
DISKSIZE=`/sbin/sfdisk -s /dev/hda2`

Notice that I'm grabbing the partition size for later checking. I use 8Gb Windows partitions on 20Gb disks, leaving space to add things later (and flexibility for buying different sized disks on new systems). Since all important files are on a server anyway, 8Gb is plenty for Win98.

All these tools are available on any decent Linux boot disk (I'm using a rescuecd with the image of the partition burned on as well to save network load - pop it in and clean up the machine in about 9 minutes). I'm also reading a .reg file from the hard disk which contains details like the computer's name, and then re-building that file to be added to the registry on next boot. It works nicely.

Re:Cold feet

[FreeLinux]

Try an OS upgrade on >2000 machines and then tell me this. Better yet, try an OS replacement, say Windows 95 to Linux on >50 machines and then tell me you don't see the point of cloning workstations.

Bzzt! Ghost walker works great!!

[FreeLinux]

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.

Re:This is the perfect backup tool

[cscx]

I'm waiting for the day when some d00d will run both on the same b0x! Then, he can like, back up his stuff through FTP, FTP it back through localhost, and it will be l33t!

Kind of like a Rube Goldberg contest for doing mundane day-to-day system maintenance tasks!

Re:It can't support Windows

[Jugomugo]

All you have to do is run 'sysprep' before you make your images. Makes it pretty easy from there.

Works For Me

[autechre]

I've still got several Win98 clients in a lab setting (the main room of my school newspaper, where all editors/writers can use them). I use Ghost to reimage them weekly, and gwalk does a fine job of changing the SID/machine name/whatever it is under Windows.

I'm interested in this, because at the moment, I need to use one of the Windows clients to generate/push images. I'd also like something that could work for MacOS (9.x, unfortunately, since we use Quark).

Welcome, but I still screwed it up

[augros]

Just a few days ago,after hours and hours of frustration and failure with Ghost and DeployCenter and other commercial products, I decided to use g4u on my college's CS lab for dual boot (RH80 and W2K). I just popped the floppy in and the image copy was underway. Too bad it corrupted both OS's filesystems. It was so simple and straight-forward I was sure it would work. Is this realease any different from the one available a few days ago? Out of all the other solutions I tried this was the closest to helpful. (Most other FOSS failed to even get DHCP up)

Re:Welcome, but I still screwed it up

[hubertf]

That's interesting... we use g4u to deploy images with Solaris/x86 and Win2k, no problem there.
Did you use different disk sizes in the process?

Reply by mail preferred (hubert@feyrer.de).
Thanks!

- Hubert

Re:Welcome, but I still screwed it up

[augros]

No, actually the machines in question were of identical hardware. When mounting the linux side under rescue mode, I found the majority of directories were butchered and turned into gigantic files. And Windows just wouldn't boot. I really have no clue what happened. Maybe it's worth another shot, but dang it takes a while to copy those images...

Quick File Distribution Challenge on Advogato

[teqo]

There has been this post at advogato couple of weeks ago which is about distributing huge amounts of data to many machines within a hilarious time... Though the solution implied by the author has not been revealed on there, it's quite an interesting read. The challenger excludes multicasting in order to make his question harder, but some posters there refer to multicast anyway...

Personally, I agree with UDP multicasting being the way for multiple network-based clones... For only a handful of clones Mondo+Mindi might be an alternative, too... No network, but CD-ROMs over sneakernet though... :)

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.

Bug report

[Istealmymusic]

Kernel panics with "failed to read sector ######" when mirroring a broken hard disk. Any workarounds?

Re:Bug report

[hubertf]

No, sorry. Blame the NetBSD folks! :-)

- Hubert

Re:Bug report

[Istealmymusic]

#dd progress=1 if=/dev/rwd0d bs=1m conv=noerror,sync | gzip -9 | ftp -n
dd: conv option disabled
?Invalid command.

No dice. I'm gonna have to try those flags on my BSD box; I hadn't realized they exist but may be exactly what I'm looking for. Thanks!

Re:Bug report

[Istealmymusic]

My apologies for replying twice, but I tried conv=noerror,sync on my BSD box and dd was able to read the entire disk image! I've been trying to recover this disk for months now; it held several important files and source code I programmed when I was 11. Thank you very much kind sir.

Funny thing is, the only hard errors where in at fsbn 113664 and 113840. The rest of the disk was flawless, but since the FAT media descriptor was damaged I can't view the disk with DOS or mount_msdos. And even more comical:

microuptime() went backwards (439.452644 -> 439.-694925999)
microuptime() went backwards (495.644229 -> 495.-694728800)
....
calcru: negative time of -695354479 usec for pid 7777 (ls)

That's kinda weird, its supposedly fixed in 5.0, I'm running the 4.7 branch with up-to-the-second CVS.

Partition Image

[ZaPhOd42]

Partimage is a similar utility based on Linux.

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.

Crimony

[FreeLinux]

Did you mean hours?? Or minutes? 8 - 10 hours to copy an image and install it is ridiculous. Norton Ghost takes about 15 minutes each way, a total of 30 minutes on similar hardware. Granted that isn't the sector by sector copy method but why use that if you don't have to? Norton Ghost handles ext2/3 partitions with no problem at all.

HP has it for quite some time already

[malkodan]

Working with HP-UX at work, i got the chance to work with the Ignite backup tool HP provides to backup their machines.
In a big cluster there is always the need that computers be as identical as possible so troubleshooting problems is easier when they take place on some computers simultanuesly.
you just mk_recovery > /dev/0m and it dumps an image to your DLT tape, you take the tape, put it in the victim machine, boot from it, it puts the image on the new hard drive (assuming there's enough space on it), you boot it again, and you have an identical machine to the one you've taken the image from, kinda neat, but works only for HP machines running HP-UX 10.20 and later.
Putting all together, g4u could possibly help deploying that technology to other unices which are non-proprioty.
May the developers continue their good job with their innovatives ideas.

Random thoughts.

[t0qer]

Just a few random thoughts on this..Sorry moderators if I get too bleeding edge for you :)

This was listed under developers when it should have been listed under desktop monkeys that run around putting out fires everytime the sales groups comes back with a crateload of laptops that just got smashed through the Chicago Ohara airport baggage system and now he/she has to get these laptops ready for the next trade show kind of person. (zoolander speak, gotta love it)

I remember doing this a few years back when I worked for Altigen. Well, ok it was transferring over the SCSI bus instead of ethernet... Here's what happened.

There was some big 'ol trade show in vegas and we were getting chummy with 'ol compaq. They wanted us to be a VAR by adding our telephony system to their servers. So as a show of like, i dunno what to call it, good faith? They shipped us 10 of their top of the line servers all decked out sweet.

Hmm, what year was that? 2000? Well, win2k was just out and our version of ghost hadn't quite caught up to M$'s new moving target NTFS. (Everytime you install any MS they do little tweaks to the MBR that aren't backwards compatible.) So me and my partner were sitting there scratching our heads. The servers had arrived 1 day before the show (late, fuqin compaq) so our choices were...

a. stay up all night installing these motherfuckers one by one.
b. figure it out.

Well, my partner was totally windows at that time, and I had been using linux for about a year and open source was getting me jazzed. I had a linux system I had scratched together from broken parts in the warehouse running next to my 2k system. So I went around IRC and reading up howto's about DD.

I made some notes and yanked the IDE drive out of my system, walked over to the compaq's and pulled a drive from each one, then filled one of them with all the drives. I put my linux IDE drive in the system and booted.

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/sda

It was a suspenseful moment to say the least. We watched as the first image was being made and almost held our breaths in anticipation as we waited for it to boot up.

Success!

That night we both went home totally stoked that we got it done without hassle. We just repeated the process for the rest of the machines and we got to go home early. I fucking hate this gay ass penguin OS for a desktop (it really sucks!!!) but i'll take it any day over any commercial product if I need to save my ass.

Thanks :)

--toq

Re:Random thoughts.

[alexburke]

That's really great -- not only did you duplicate the OS and software image, but you also duplicated the security identifiers (SIDs). This will cause all sorts of havoc if any of those duplicated machines are on the same network.

Read up about it at Microsoft's Support's website.

Re:Random thoughts.

[MyHair]

You're either a pengofoob, or you need to get laid. Soon.

Um, who doesn't need to get laid soon?

Re:Random thoughts.

[0x0d0a]

I fucking hate this gay ass penguin OS for a desktop (it really sucks!!!) but i'll take it any day over any commercial product if I need to save my ass.

Compared to what? You said that it was your partner that was a Windows nut...BSD? Solaris? As *desktop* systems?

Re:Random thoughts.

[t0qer]

SID's only matter if the machines are all in the same domain, for stand alone servers it makes no difference. You prolly knew that but forgot because you're soo smart you told me to read the MS site.

Shaddup, just shaddup before I bury my boot in your ass ok? I just get back from a great night of drinking to find your stupid ass comment sitting right underneath my +5 comment and you're as irritating as a hemmoroid. K?

kthnx

kthnx

DOES NOT WORK

[Istealmymusic]

wd0: (uncorrectable data error)
wd0: transfer error, downgrading to PIO mode 4
wd0(pciide0:0:1): using PIO mode 4
wd0d: error reading fsbn 56960 of 56960-57087 (wd0 bn 569760; cn 60 tn 4 sn 8); retrying
...
dd: /dev/rwd0d: Input/output error

27+0 records in
27+0 records out
28311552 bytes transferred in 41.015 secs (690273 bytes/sec)
226 Transfer complete.
8087791 bytes sent in 00:37 (211.08 KB/s)
221 Goodbye.
rm: not found
#
Any help?

Re:DOES NOT WORK

[hubertf]

Help how? If you follow the instructions on the web page closely, you will see it'll warn you to ignore the errors (well, the first ones - missing 'rm' is a hitch I'll fix in 1.9 :-).

After that, you should be able to deploy the disk image.

- Hubert

Re:DOES NOT WORK

[Istealmymusic]

First and foremost, I would like to thank you for your response. I had not expected an authoritive reply from the author himself. :)

But if you look at the dd stats I provided above, you'll see only 29 or so blocks where output. I have a fairly small disk, but it was very disheartening to know that only 27MB could be recovered off my 6GB disk. I realize G4U isn't a ...hey wait, I just read my other post and someone said dd will ignore the errors if passed conv=noerror,sync. I would suggest you implement such an option in G4U, it would give folks like me who have bad hard disks they want to mirror laying around a lot less headaches :).

Cheers, and congrats with the nice utility,
Istealmymusic

Setting the record straight

[yerricde]

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.

Re:Setting the record straight

[clifyt]

That YOU changed. It doesn't stop you from ripping out the copyright notices and claiming that it was written then by you.

The GPL makes its notice to make YOU sign your name to it if you change anything to ensure that if you screw something up that the original author doesn't get his reputation tarnished because of your modifications.

So, I decide I want to change a variable name, I'm now considered to be the only one that needs to have my name on the license.

The GPL is a religion, its not a license. BSD is common sense and is as close to coming to public domain as possible but still ensuring the author gets credit for his work. I wish folks would stop bowing down to the GPL as if it were given to you by God and thus infallible...

Re:Setting the record straight

[Dwonis]

Are you offended by the concept of people profiting from your work? You will be well-protected if you employ the GPL.

That's a myth. The GPL doesn't stop people from profiting from your work. Read about it.

Another One

[OrangeHairMan]

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

Great

[CaptainSuperBoy]

Wow, looks like someone put dd on a boot disk! Will the innovation never cease?

Come on, there IS a reason people pay for ghost. I for one, would like some assurance that I can clone disks that aren't exactly identical..

Re:Great

[adb]

dd writes to the network the same way it reads from the disk: standard I/O, with kernel support for the I/O methods it needs. I do my backups with a stock NetBSD boot disk and dd to an NFS partition. So nyeah.

Re:Great

[BlueUnderwear]

I do my backups with a stock NetBSD boot disk and dd to an NFS partition. So nyeah.

But that way you can't do any multicast. If you now want to restore your image on a whole classroom of PC's at once, each of the receiver PC's will ask for each sector on its own, and the whole thing slows down to a crawl. Not to mention that even with only one machine, NFS's performance is not exactly stellar...

Re:Disk to Disk Cloning?

[hubertf]

I guess I should really add this next time.
For now you can do:

dd if=/dev/rwd0d of=/dev/rwd1d bs=1m progress=1

(Yeah, that's Unix! I will give you a shell wrapper in g4u 1.9. Suggestions for a name, anyone? :-)

- Hubert

Sparse files

[yerricde]

[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".

Re:Sparse files

[BlueUnderwear]

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".

Not when writeing these zeroes. Sparse files are created by skipping over the sectors (using fseek), and then actually writing the last sector. Or, alternatively, by truncating the file to a bigger size than it currently is.

The cat /dev/zero >hugefile trick won't create a sparse file. But be careful with it on certain older versions of reiserfs: these can't deal with 100% full disks, and may mix up a couple of files in the process.

Re:Seems like a good idea.

[hubertf]

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 fail to see anything new here?

[bourne]

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.

Re:I fail to see anything new here?

[hubertf]

Of course there is nothing new in g4u, it's just Unix after all.

But why spend an afternoon surfing the web for alternatives to Ghost, DriveImage and friends when you can rewrite your own version from which you know what it does, and while there get famous on /.?

- Hubert

P.S.: Does Ghost etc. support Gigabit Ethernet? USB Ethernet? Token Ring? No? Of course not - have fun finding the necessary DOS drivers.
See the g4u webpage for reasons why I wrote this. :)

Re:I fail to see anything new here?

[bourne]

Does Ghost etc. support Gigabit Ethernet? USB Ethernet? Token Ring? No? Of course not - have fun finding the necessary DOS drivers.

Hell, Ghost barely supports most laptops with pcmcia ether. But that hasn't stopped it from being the tool of choice for IT departments, because they want to take an image made on machine hardware X and be able to blow it onto machine hardware X.0.1.

I wonder, though, if you could boot a Unix CD with the appropriate weird network driver and then run Ghost under dosemu or something like that... All it wants is net and disk, why not? That doesn't solve your problem with finding a Unix server, but it would be an interesting experiment.

In any case, congratulations for making it onto /., and for having your server survive...

Re:I fail to see anything new here?

[evilviper]

UDPcast supports any network that Linux will support, while also sending the image in multicast to save loads of time and bandwidth.

Want to do some good? Combine PartImage with UDPcast/NetCast so that there is open source software that does a better job than Ghost...

Re:hmms

[eyegor]

One problem with blindly dding images and compressing them is that "slack space" that previously contained data may be incompressible and will lead to large images unless the data is zeroed out first. The same problem will be seen when imaging swap space.

I wrote a utility for Solaris boxen that uses ufsdump and ufsrestore to do the same (as well as copying the disk layout (format.dat) via the format command). All mounted slices get gzipped and can be stored on NFS-mounted drives. When you restore, you can specify a different disk layout by changing the format.dat file prior to the restore. It takes about a half hour to dump a full solaris install with about a gig of other applications/data on the drive. Total image size is about 1.5 Gig.

I plan on writing a Linux flavor of the same utility, but dealing with icky PC drive formats will be a LOT harder than with SPARC Solaris drives.

Ghost 7.5 experience

[ModelX]

Quite recently I used Ghost 7.5 to clone a win2k+rh8 installation to 15 workstations. My experience was the following:

it can clone win2k partitions without any problems

it has problems cloning redhat 8.0 ext3 partitions (cloning breaks with a strange error)

it can clone anything in the sector by sector mode (the images are compressed on the fly)

it is extremely efficient in multicasting mode - it cloned to 14 machines only slightly slower than to a single machine!!

a lousy DOS packet driver can cause really strange problems (that's the driver problem, but still it does affect ghost!)

I see advantages and disadvantages with g4u:

+ you are not tied to a win32 ghost server on the LAN, you merely need a reachable FTP server

+ many many NIC drivers included

- no multicasting

Seeing visitors to the site

[moz25]

I wonder.. am I the only one who reloaded his page a couple times to see how quickly the visitor number at the bottom increased as a result of the slashdot effect? :-)

Cheers,

Moz.

ALL NICs.

[Forge]

Linux dosn't suport every NIC. Niether dose any OS. However Linux dose prety well.

My idea is to produce a utility like this with all autoloadeble NIC drivers included. Of course it would practicaly be aLinux distribution andwouldneed a CD for those files but so what?

PS: Away to have it produce a floppy with just the right driver once it gets a working combination would be cool.

Re:ALL NICs.

[Forge]

Not that you have a brain or anything but.

New versions of Windows do not support ISA NICs (This problem has biten me in the behind) and old versions don't support most PCI NICs.

Hell that stupid little OS has unilateraly desided that nobody wants to use a serial mouse. Meanwhile the shop I buy parts at still has Serial mice in stock.

PS: Why do you have such a foul mouth?

use multicast rsync

[g4dget]

I agree that g4u doesn't sound like the best solution, at least for Linux installations. But even for occasional disk mirroring from a rescue floppy, one can do better than "nc" with little or no effort.

A technically better solution is probably to use multicast rsync, either on the raw partition, or on the mounted file system. Using it on a mounted file system has the advantage that it works on live file systems, can deal with different drive geometries, and doesn't waste any time copying free blocks that still contain data.

If you do use "nc", there are two things you should do first: (1) clear out any free data on the source partitions by "cat /dev/zero > junk; rm junk" (this will improve compression), and (2) use gzip, as in "gzip /dev/hda".

Oops -- HTML quoting wrong

[g4dget]

This should have been: (2) use gzip, as in "gzip < /dev/hda | nc -l -p 5030" and "nc server 5030 | gunzip > /dev/hda".

use rsync or multicast rsync

[g4dget]

Netpipes with tar is OK in a pinch, but for ghosting rsync is probably the better solution all around. With rsync, you can already get a multicast server and don't have to "write your own".

Re:Cold feet

[kevin lyda]

redhat: kickstart.

solaris: jumpstart.

Speed increase? How about rsync?

[leonbrooks]

I'd be tempted to sniff the partition table (do diskslices have an equivalent?) and if it was similar, throw rsync at the problem. If you're repairing a minimally but obscurely damaged disk, rsync should leave no bit unturned but also involve very little network traffic.

It would probably be instructive to try rsync anyway. It dramatically slashes the transfer time even on compressed CDs (e.g. Mandrake Cooker CD's a few subreleases apart).

Setting that aside and turning to multiple clients, having a `what-do-I-need' MD5 broadcasting session followed by a multicast or broadcast of the required blocks (and refrain, in case a client missed anything) would probably save a lot of bandwidth except on initial installs where every answer would be `I need everything'. You could invent a nifty little sparse-blocks reply algorithm that listed ranges in the simple case and bitmaps on messy sections.

Improving the value of notGhosts

[leonbrooks]

Those unused sectors will most probably be full of binary zeroes, which compress to almost nothing.

And if not, just run over it with SecureDelete's wipe-the-empty-space utility. If you don't have that to hand, this command will do near enough:

dd if=/dev/zero of=zeroes; rm -f zeroes

You'll need to run those once on every real partition.

SystemImager

[FredGray]

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.

Udpcast

[KPU]

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.

Re: Seems like a good idea.

[Omniscient Ferret]

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.

g4u?

[loconet]

Ghost for unix? already done.

Re:Symantec Ghost is platform independat

[styrotech]

Don't you mean x86 OS independant rather than platform independant? As far as I'm aware it only works on PCs.

Re:Disk to Disk Cloning?

[hubertf]

Please read a dd(1) manpage somewhere.

rwd0d is the raw device (r) of the first IDE disk (wd0), using a special partition (d) that spans the disk from the very first to the very last byte.
I *think* it's the same as hda under Linux, but I'm not sure there.

- Hubert

Bad luck/Bad network

[Large Green Mallard]

I've used Ghost to deploy images to 80 machines simultaneously and it's never had problems, except when the PCs are new and have loose network cards.

Of course, this is over switched 100M ethernet run with Cisco 2924/2950s. YMMV with coax/hubs/whatever.

Re:Yes, lets Set the record straight

[prizog]

Hi. I'm a GPL Compliance Engineer for the Free Software Foundation. Part of my job is to find GPL violations and help enforce the GPL.

It looks like the Virgin Webplayer violation is years old and no longer ongoing. So, there's not much that can be done about it now.

It's true that two years ago, we pursued fewer GPL violations than we do now. This was before I started working for the foundation. Now, we pursue every report that we receive. We can't do much on software where we don't hold copyright, but almost all violations include one of gcc, glibc, gzip, or bash. I've solved dozens of violations in the eight or so months I've been working on it, and it's quite rewarding.

Instead of complaining that nobody ever does anything about GPL violations, why not help? Send violation reports to lv@fsf.org, with as much detail as possible.