[NTLUG:Discuss] Norton Ghost equivalent for linux

[gan hawk]

Hi,

G4U (http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/) is a ghost equivalent for unix. But it 
requires a FTP server and if you have just 4 boxes, you might as well use 
ssh as discribed below. In case you do not have a Live CD image, you can use 
the Live CD (netbsd) provided in the G4U website.

For those of you who want to image lot of computers (like > 200), I found 
this software dolly (http://corvus.kek.jp/~manabe/pcf/dolly/index.htm) 
usefull. It creates a ring using all the computers and pushes the image in 
large chunks. Each computer recives the chunk, writes to the hard drive and 
passes the image chunk to the next computer. Using this, I could image 200 
computers with a 8GB image in 2.5 hours. Other software like G4U has a 
serious bottle neck on the FTP server for a large number of computers.

Ganesh



>From: Chris Cox <cjcox at acm.org>
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>Subject: Re: [NTLUG:Discuss] Norton Ghost equivalent for linux
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>Thomas Cameron wrote:
>>You can use dd for local drives, but they have to be identical.  So put
>>your source drive as the slave on the first IDE controller, your target
>>drive as the master on the second IDE controller, and do this:
>>
>>dd if=/dev/hdb of=/dev/hdc
>
>Or across the network, boot each box with a recovery cd image
>that has network connectivity and some kind of rsh or ssh (more
>likely) transport.
>
>On the box being created do:
>
>ssh existing-host "gzip -c </dev/hda" | gzip -d -c >/dev/hda
>
>(you can skip the gzip if you the bandwidth)
>
>ssh existing-host "cat /dev/hda" >/dev/hda
>
>If I'm doing several, I store the image on a storage server
>in compressed form:
>
>(on existing-host)
>gzip -c </dev/hda | ssh storage-server "cat >/images/mydisk.img"
>
>Then on the boxes being prepped use a recovery CD with
>networking:
>
>ssh storage-server "cat /images/mydisk.img" | gzip -d -c >/dev/hda
>
>(if you like the flexibiliy of having uncompressed images
>you can do that and skip the gzip compression stuff.. nice
>to have if you plan to mount the disk image read only on
>the storage-server for instance).
>
>
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