Re: [Sheflug] Build/Ghost software

[Matthew Palmer <nospam [at] ieee.uow.edu.au>]

On Fri, 13 Jul 2001, Barrie Bremner wrote:

> I'm after some suggests (and experiences) for a image ghosting system,
> to allow my department to do builds of various Win NT, 2000 and 9x
> systems, mainly Compaq laptops, HP Vectras and clone PCs without the
> cost of Symantec Ghost software.

If you're running Debian (if you're not, you should be <g>) check out FAI. 
It'll allow you to do exactly what you want.  It'll do all forms of WIndows,
as well as installing Debian with all it's trimmings.  My main experience is
with using it to build BeoWulfs and the workstations here, but it does do a
rather snazzy job of putting Windows on machines - you make the partition,
mkfs.vfat on it, and then untar your whole image onto the partition.  It
does help rather a lot if it's going to be dual boot, but I don't see why it
can't produce a Windows-only result.

> AMANDA (which I've heard of, but can't find any online docs for)
> http://www.amanda.org/

Backup software.  Dunno about it's ghosting ability.

> g4u (NetBSD floppies to make and fetch images to/from ftp server)
> http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

This sounds kind of like what FAI does, but I know FAI is very flexible and
customisable.  For instance, if you wanted different classes of machines,
you could instruct FAI to install different tarballs - one might have
Office, another would have Visual C++, etc etc.

> Partition Image (NTFS not fully supported?)
> http://www.partimage.org/

Never heard of it.  Sounds like a colleague of FIPS rather than a ghosting
tool.

> The AMANDA site mentioned using Samba/SMB for Win32 systems, any ideas on
> how this works?

Sounds like you'd need a working Windows system booted on the box before
using this, which is probably going to require ghosting before you can
ghost, as it were.

> Does anyone have any other suggestions?

FAI.  Much fun to be had all round, and it does a beautiful job of making
automatic custom Debian boxes... <g>


-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
#include <disclaimer.h>
Matthew Palmer
mjp16@ieee.uow.edu.au

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Sheffield Linux User's Group - http://www.sheflug.co.uk
To unsubscribe from this list send mail to
- <sheflug-request [at] vuw.ac.nz> - with the word 
 "unsubscribe" in the body of the message. 

  GNU the choice of a complete generation.