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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?"
That doesn't have the bullshit licensing agreement. Norton has effectively fsked themselves out of the clone market with their totally absurd licensing requirements.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
G4U, a unix based cloning tool.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
Assuming you are imaging the laptops with Windows, I can't imagine you having to image a linux laptop as often for some reason or another...
Anyway, back in the day I got a free copy of Ghost with my motherboard. Now that they are completely owned by the Symantec umbrella, they are probably quite a bit more expensive, but I bet you can still get a single-user burn-to-a-dvd-with-the-image for relatively little. If that is to expensive, then go learn DD or some of the more advanced techniques that I am sure will pop up all over this board. Why buy the total solution when you aren't really going to use it anyway? Also, if you are in a windows environment, perhaps their RIS Server product would do what you need as well? Can the laptops boot from the network?
was this so hard?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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.
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.
The program isn't debugged until the last user is dead.
I beg to differ. Given the option of paying, I'd buy Altiris. Image blaster has always been more effective IMHO and the desktop support capabilities integrated into the altiris product line (Remote Desktop/Scripting/Rapid Installs etc.) Are pretty darn robust; ignoring a few frustrations in older versions (mostly cosmetic) that is.
Their support is excellent and their Database integration for centralized inventory tracking and software inventory tracking is very useful. Not to mention having the data in ready to use SQL form.
It's a step up from Ghost for sure, and for the enterprise it does integrate with HP OpenView. But, you're not supposed to talk about real closed source pay for solutions on Slashdot. *waves hand* This isn't the product you're looking for. It's certainly not cheap, and it's certainly not something you'd want to rush into.
And as long as I'm on a rant about good pay for solutions, if all the guy wants to use is ghost functionality why not use RIS? Other than the whole Microsoft Homogeny thing it seems to work nearly as well (if not better) than ghost.
http://www.rajeevnet.com/hacks_hints/os_clone/os_c loning.html
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.
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
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.
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).
m age.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/parti
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.
We use Ghost 8 where I work for rolling out new machines. It's a lifesaver when we replace a lab (I work in Higher Ed). However once the machines are in the lab, we "freeze" them with Deep Freeze. Unless the hard drive fails we never have to reimage them again. I don't know how the pricing for Deep Freeze will compare to the pricing for Ghost, but if you don't have to reimage them, don't. The URL for Deep Freeze is http://www.faronics.com/index.asp
I'm very responsible, when ever something goes wrong they always say I'm responsible.
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.
Id use a mounted filesystem and use dd to copy an image to the other networked machine. Just use the following to copy your hard drive...
/remote_computer_mount_point/
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/your_hard_drive bs=512
And then, you can run netcat from the tun device
nc -i tun0 >
Be aware, your mileage may vary.
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.
/etc/passwd file with the same UID.)
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
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.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
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.
Seagate's DiscWizard. Worked for me.
have you read the Moderation Guidelines Addendum?
Whyinhell would you use a block size of 515? Not only is it too small, it is neither a divisor nor a multiplier the sector size -- guaranteeing inefficient reblocking.
Maybe IHBT.
If you're even considering imaging, please don't. Try unattended. It may take a week or two and a few dozen trial installs but once you get the hang of it you will never want to go back to imaging.
Look at it this way. With unattended, you can assign different profiles to different computers, and they can inherit from each other. Say one group needs x apps, another group needs y apps, and another groops needs x y and z. With unattented that can all be maintained with three very small batch scripts. With imaging you would need to create three large images, and maintain each of them. With unattended, you maintain the master packages and all of your configurations make use of it.
Hardware detection is also easy. When I dealed with cloning I ended up having to keep multiple copies of the same image but configured for each different hardware. With unattended, you extract all the drivers into the $oem$/$1 directory and each computer's hardware is automatically detected and configured during the install. I can easly add any new hardware I want with no additional maintence.
If you need to apply different policies (without AD) learn how to use secedit. It's easy to write secedit and regedit scripts for unattended that will apply all configuration and policies automatically. Microsoft's Windows XP Security Guide covers this well.
Try unattended. You will not regret it.
Also, just as a comment to the above post, it's not neccessary that the NICs support PXE. Etherboot solves that. Etherboot gives a small (15k) image that can be put on a floppy, cdrom, lilo/grub, etc and will boot to PXE. It's not neccessary for the NIC to support it.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks