PC Cloning Solution?

pbaumgar asks: "Like many here on Slashdot, I'm a Systems Administrator. I have become responsible for maintaining about 300 laptops that I need to rebuild on a regular basis. I am looking for a solution to image them. I've been looking at Symantec's Ghost Solution Suite and am not too gung-ho on spending all that money for licensing. Can anyone recommend an better solution that would be cheaper?"

Comments

G4U

[Xunker]

G4U, a unix based cloning tool.

Re:G4U

[atomic-penguin]

Ghost 4 Unix Pros:
1) It's free.
2) You don't have to start the cloning process over if one machine fails.
3) Some versions of Norton Ghost do not catch the boot sector. This can be a problem when you want to have a boot loader on the MBR.
4) It does an actual disk dump. No proprietary format here.

Ghost 4 Unix Cons:
1) In some cases, it is not fast. Hey, it's faster than piping this over a SSH connection.
2) It doesn't do multicast, a benefit of Norton Ghost. Which lets you send the image out as a broadcast to all the machines.

My experiences with Norton Ghost: The multicast feature can crash some networking equipment. There is nothing more annoying than getting 97% done and having to start over on one or all of the machines. Norton Ghost can bring a large network to it's knees. You may need to carry the Ghost server around with you. Especially if your network spans more than one building or floor.

My experiences with Ghost for Unix: I setup an FTP server in the lab I was working in. There is no special server software, just a plain old FTP server. Dumped the master image on the FTP server. Started about 20 clients imaging. Go and grab a lunch or two. Come back and start any failed downloads later. It worked even on a dusty old switch known to crash with Norton Ghost. How cool is that?

Re:G4U

[eyeball]

If you're doing windows cloning, you may want to look into this free NewSid Utility from sysinternals.

Re:G4U

[OnyxRaven]

More Pros:
-Just needs ftp or ssh or whatever you can connect with (ftp by default)

More Cons:
-uses DD for disk dump - this means if you have lots of empty space on a big disk it'll come over too, and likely, it'll be junk (making it hard to compress an image). the G4U site has some ideas on how to get around that.

Recently I'm using FreeBSD, but my disks are slightly different between a few of the machines, so I'm using dump/restore and the livecd portion of disk1 of freebsd 5.4 (and now 6) to create the partition, ifconfig, then ssh/cat > restore on the new drive (then rename, rebuild host keys, etc). works like a charm.

Re:G4U

[nachoboy]

If you're doing windows cloning, you may want to look into this free NewSid Utility from sysinternals.

Except for the fact that doing so puts you squarely in unsupported territory. The only supported way to duplicate Windows boxes is by using Sysprep (also free and already included on your Windows CD).

Re:G4U

[Jjeff1]

My experiences with Norton Ghost: The multicast feature can crash some networking equipment.

It's not just you, but it's not really Ghost's fault. I deal with multicast quite a bit, not just ghost. Multicast can be a pain. If you have network gear that isn't multicast aware (impliments IGMP), then you'll be a sad panda when you fire up ghost in multicast mode. One of the issues Ghost does have is the entire multicast goes at the speed of the slowest PC. So if you have a dodgy disk in a PC, your whole image might slow down to the point of stopping.
Cisco developed their own multicast standard, called CGMP, some older cisco switches "support" multicast, but only this older standard, which won't work with virtually anything else.
The point to remember is this - enable IGMP (also called IGMP pruning or IGMP sniffing) on every VLAN on every switch you intend to have multicast traffic on. On your router(s), enable PIM or DVMRP.

Re:the solution

[halfnerd]

If the parent meant partimage, I'll second that. Used that for my school to install fresh windows images once a month. We used a Linux Live-CD called System rescue cd and had the image shared on a server with gigabit connection. The windows image had to be created with a fat32-filesystem, but that was 'convert'ed to ntfs on first boot thanks to some scripts I wrote. Check out help convert in cmd if you need to use windows.

Re:Google and I agree: Acronis

[failedlogic]

I would agree. Back when I was a Windows user ..(now a Mac).. I had made several attempts to make a working image with Acronis. This was a late 2004 release I was using and had patched. Having two identical drives (manufacturer and size) I tried to restore the image (to make sure it works). Only after making 3 attempts at an image did it actually work.

DriveImage by PowerQuest is a great program.

Why Imaging?

[fdragon]

System imaging solutions such as Symantec Ghost are good solutions for most people, but are not always the right solution.

What may be a good solution that is adaptive to your needs is this solution : http://unattended.sourceforge.net/

Combine this with a good method for getting a PXE boot setup (and devices that support the feature) and you will be able to create a menu that will allow you to automate system installs of Windows, Linux, and possible other systems, plus installing their related applicaton software later.

With this setup you can do system installs for any type of hardware that comes your way. Laptop vendor change the network card chipset without bothering to change the spec sheet? No problem, just add the driver to the above build instructions and life goes on.

dd+netcat

[the eric conspiracy]

http://www.rajeevnet.com/hacks_hints/os_clone/os_c loning.html

Knoppix + partimage

[Florian]

I have excellent experiences with partimage. It creates image files of both Windows (FAT & NTFS), Linux and *BSD partitions, compressing them with gzip/bzip, optionally breaking them down to fixed size segments (for CD-R/DVD-R backups). It also can save and restore file system image via the net through partimaged, an optional file server.

Since partimage is contained on every Knoppix CD, the easiest and cheapest solution is to boot your computer with Knoppix, save the file system image either to a local disk or over the network to another computer running partimaged.

What about RIS?

[jarod670]

If you have a Windows Server 2000 or Server 2003 environment, what about RIS? Once you get it set up, I think it is much faster than ghost for pulling images down, plus you don't have to worry about SIDs. Plus the big bonus it's FREE.

Partimage

[sybarite]

Try partimage (http://www.partimage.org/ . It doesn't have all the management tools like remote imaging, certificate security, etc, but I routinely use partimage from a Knoppix CD to clone Windows machines. Once cloned you can change the sid using newsid.exe from Sysinternals (http://www.digitalissues.co.uk/html/os/misc/parti mage.html).

If you want to get really creative, maybe you could put a small linux partition on the systems that you can boot to for this purpose. Or maybe you could make a bootable system restore CD. Here is a faq to get started: http://www.digitalissues.co.uk/html/os/misc/partim age.html.

For Windows

[N1ghtFalcon]

If the whole thing is windows-based look into RIS. It's a pain to configure properly, but it is more flexible and once you get a hang of it it's quite convenient.

Altiris deployment solution

[Jjeff1]

Not cheap. But it lets us create a hardware independant disk image and deploy it remotely to PCs. I believe it has some Linux support, but is mostly a windows product. It gathers hardware inventory on most any coporate level machine (including serial numbers). We can also build remote install packages to deply software and settings after images have been created.
While it keeps track of all the packages and images deployed, it doesn't automatically restore everything.
CA also has a similar product, it doesn't deploy images, only the windows unattended install stuff. However in addition to keeping track of packages, it will automatically redeploy them. Useful for when a HDD dies. You start the base image deployment, CA takes care of everything done since then.
Both packages support PXE boot and Wake On Lan. So you can remotely boot up a bare metal machine and get it operational.
These are pretty large programs, you'll want to talk to a sales person at those places and get a demo. Even if a demo is available, get them to demo it to you, you can't hope to learn the stuff in a couple days on your own.

Re:Simple DD

[Webmoth]

While dd WILL make a perfect clone of a system, it is not the ideal solution for cloning systems (especially Windows) BECAUSE it makes perfect clones.

The problem lies in that for every user, machine, account, group, domain, ENTITY in a Windows environment, there is a globally unique identifier known as a SID. When you clone a machine, you also clone the SID. When you've got two or more machines with the same SID on a network, you WILL have problems. Renaming the machine does not change the machine SID, and Windows knows things more by the SID than by the name. (Think about having two users in your Linux /etc/passwd file with the same UID.)

Secondly, dd is not ideal because it does a bitwise copy. If you are cloning a badly fragmented disk, your clone will be badly fragmented. You'll also get all the cruft left behind from deleted files. Ghost can do a dd-like bitwise copy, but in its primary mode it only copies the extant files. If you've got a 120GB disk with only 5GB used, dd will copy 120GB of bits whereas Ghost will copy 5GB of files. Think of the time involved. If your new drive/partition is not the same as the old one, you can't reliably use dd.

That being said, there are utilities available for changing the machine SID.

Run Sysprep to change the SID.

[Futurepower(R)]

I suggest you use only Sysprep to change the SID. I've tried other tools, such as the one from Sysinternals.com, and they have introduced errors.

There is a download site, but Microsoft's search facility has never worked very well, and I can't find the URL now. Wait, I found it: Sysprep.exe for Windows XP Service Pack 2.

Use only the version of Sysprep.exe and Deploy.cab meant for your operating system and service pack.

When you run Sysprep, you automatically change the SID.

Re:Hard Drive Manufactures Software

[xiong.chiamiov]

Seagate's DiscWizard. Worked for me.