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

Look for an earlier copy of Ghost

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

That doesn't have the bullshit licensing agreement. Norton has effectively fsked themselves out of the clone market with their totally absurd licensing requirements.

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

[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.

Google and I agree: Acronis

[Gothmolly]

was this so hard?

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.

Ok I'll bite.

[Oriumpor]

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.

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.

Re:What about RIS?

[obeythefist]

I've worked in large scale corporate environments (400+ workstations) configured for RIS and there's no equivalent. You can dynamically add/change/update images. You can roll in patches for the heck of it in a matter of moments. You never need to worry about where your install media is, you just press F12 and you have a new SOE image on the workstation. You never have to burn off new copies of your install media because it's all live. The admin who set up RIS also set up a diagnostic boot using the RIS network boot that loaded disk recovery tools and so on from the RIS server. The cost of RIS is included with the Windows server license (so yes, beer free) and the ongoing costs will be lower as your updates will cost you less in terms of build media and so on.

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.

Easy..

[Creepy Crawler]

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...

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/your_hard_drive bs=512

And then, you can run netcat from the tun device

nc -i tun0 > /remote_computer_mount_point/

Be aware, your mileage may vary.

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.