Ghost for Unix

junyoung writes "Hubert Feyrer released the latest version of g4u ("ghost for unix"), a NetBSD-based bootfloppy/CD-ROM image that allows one to easily clone PC harddisks by using FTP. Since it reads the disk bit by bit, it can create an image of any operating system and any file system. Besides, it's free (under BSD style license)."

fli4l and ncftp

[WolfgangR]

I should have learned about ghost 1 week earlier! In between I found another solution: fli4l to generate a linux boot floppy containing ncftp.

Note: ncftp can directly read and write /dev/hda, hda1 etc. Maybe other FTP clients can too, but ncftp was the first one I found. (Hint: When writing, use option A=append)

The rest should be easy to set up. You could automate it by writing scripts with ncftpbatch.

Ghost doesn't work with non-PC's...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever try using Ghost on a Sparc station? Ghost can't handle any file systems at all if they aren't sitting on x86 hardware, which is a problem g4u can solve. So that's two problems with Ghost.

Wipe every free block for great compression

[yerricde]

I don't understand why reading the raw data is an advantage -- you get images the size of your hard disk or partition instead of the size of the data.

Shouldn't matter. If you have wiped your drive's free space (trivial; use a program that creates thousands of 1 MB files filled with a repeating pattern) first, an "image the size of the hard disk or partition" will compress much smaller.

Ghost 7.5 can understand fat/ntfs/ext2 and ext3.

But does it grok ReiserFS or any of the other more obscure filesystems in use on servers?

Re:Ghost is worth the money

[Anonymous Coward]

There are far more than four filesystems in use today on intel/unix boxes... ghost might get these four pretty good but what about xfs, jfs, ufs, reiserfs, etc.... ? That's why it needs the ability to do raw partition copies.

Quick File Distribution Challenge on Advogato

[teqo]

There has been this post [advogato.com] at advogato couple of weeks ago which is about distributing huge amounts of data to many machines within a hilarious time... Though the solution implied by the author has not been revealed on there, it's quite an interesting read. The challenger excludes multicasting in order to make his question harder, but some posters there refer to multicast anyway...

Personally, I agree with UDP multicasting being the way for multiple network-based clones... For only a handful of clones Mondo+Mindi [microwerks.net] might be an alternative, too... No network, but CD-ROMs over sneakernet though... :)

Re:This is very nice

[tcc]

> Ever since Symantec bought Ghost, they've been changing it from a simple, easy to use, small, beautiful and most of all SMALL utility to a typical bloated pile of junk

Actually, you could say that about just EVERY product they've bought, EXEPT ghost.

The executable still fits on a 1.44MB diskette with MSDOS bootable files, and has a LOAD of features for the size.

I don't care about the TAR or tape driver portion of it, but I sure do care about the splitting, compression, encryption, being able to read the god damn compressed/encrypted/segmented file WITHOUT having to reghost it back to a hard drive in case I need a single file, I love being able to ghost directly to CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, to another machine or straight to a win2k server with ghost enterprise) exept that this portion is more or less good because of the fact that you need a dos packet driver and it causes a PITA with modern networking cards. I love the fact that it even worked with my 1.2TB raid (yeah, just for testing :)), it proves that the code base is solid and WORKS, all the features WORKS, they don't have crap like product activation, they aren't being lame about expiry or whatever other PITA software come with. This tool is one of the few that I'd put on EVERY sysadmin desk.

Okay it's not free, but it sure isn't overpriced compared to office suites or some other software out there that are doing far less and are in no way near as reliable as Ghost is. It pays for itself. Now if you want to compare this with a unix variant, be my guest, I have nothing against competition, but I sure do have something against +4 insightful comments based on something thrown in the air without substancial evidence. This isn't Norton Internet Security or Personnal Firewall that we are talking about (yes they really killed Atguard with this pile of ... ).

The only thing I'd complain about ghost is that it's still dos based. I'd like to be able to have a hotswap IDE bay and keep my Win2k machine up and plug the drive, ghost it, move the file to my datacenter, and unplug without having to reboot or anything, that would be great, right now I use a testbench for this and it's still good enough for my needs, and saving me a LOT of time.

HP has it for quite some time already

[malkodan]

Working with HP-UX at work, i got the chance to work with the Ignite backup tool HP provides to backup their machines.
In a big cluster there is always the need that computers be as identical as possible so troubleshooting problems is easier when they take place on some computers simultanuesly.
you just mk_recovery > /dev/0m and it dumps an image to your DLT tape, you take the tape, put it in the victim machine, boot from it, it puts the image on the new hard drive (assuming there's enough space on it), you boot it again, and you have an identical machine to the one you've taken the image from, kinda neat, but works only for HP machines running HP-UX 10.20 and later.
Putting all together, g4u could possibly help deploying that technology to other unices which are non-proprioty.
May the developers continue their good job with their innovatives ideas.

Random thoughts.

[t0qer]

Just a few random thoughts on this..Sorry moderators if I get too bleeding edge for you :)

This was listed under developers when it should have been listed under desktop monkeys that run around putting out fires everytime the sales groups comes back with a crateload of laptops that just got smashed through the Chicago Ohara airport baggage system and now he/she has to get these laptops ready for the next trade show kind of person. (zoolander speak, gotta love it)

I remember doing this a few years back when I worked for Altigen. Well, ok it was transferring over the SCSI bus instead of ethernet... Here's what happened.

There was some big 'ol trade show in vegas and we were getting chummy with 'ol compaq. They wanted us to be a VAR by adding our telephony system to their servers. So as a show of like, i dunno what to call it, good faith? They shipped us 10 of their top of the line servers all decked out sweet.

Hmm, what year was that? 2000? Well, win2k was just out and our version of ghost hadn't quite caught up to M$'s new moving target NTFS. (Everytime you install any MS they do little tweaks to the MBR that aren't backwards compatible.) So me and my partner were sitting there scratching our heads. The servers had arrived 1 day before the show (late, fuqin compaq) so our choices were...

a. stay up all night installing these motherfuckers one by one.
b. figure it out.

Well, my partner was totally windows at that time, and I had been using linux for about a year and open source was getting me jazzed. I had a linux system I had scratched together from broken parts in the warehouse running next to my 2k system. So I went around IRC and reading up howto's about DD.

I made some notes and yanked the IDE drive out of my system, walked over to the compaq's and pulled a drive from each one, then filled one of them with all the drives. I put my linux IDE drive in the system and booted.

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/sda

It was a suspenseful moment to say the least. We watched as the first image was being made and almost held our breaths in anticipation as we waited for it to boot up.

Success!

That night we both went home totally stoked that we got it done without hassle. We just repeated the process for the rest of the machines and we got to go home early. I fucking hate this gay ass penguin OS for a desktop (it really sucks!!!) but i'll take it any day over any commercial product if I need to save my ass.

Thanks :)

--toq

Ghost 7.5 experience

[ModelX]

Quite recently I used Ghost 7.5 to clone a win2k+rh8 installation to 15 workstations. My experience was the following:

it can clone win2k partitions without any problems

it has problems cloning redhat 8.0 ext3 partitions (cloning breaks with a strange error)

it can clone anything in the sector by sector mode (the images are compressed on the fly)

it is extremely efficient in multicasting mode - it cloned to 14 machines only slightly slower than to a single machine!!

a lousy DOS packet driver can cause really strange problems (that's the driver problem, but still it does affect ghost!)

I see advantages and disadvantages with g4u:

+ you are not tied to a win32 ghost server on the LAN, you merely need a reachable FTP server

+ many many NIC drivers included

- no multicasting

Re:Only if it's the same size disk

[G27 Radio]

If the target is 1 sector less, you aren't going to be able to use this tool.

This is true, but if the target is larger you're still OK. I've never used the Unix version, but the DOS version would restore to a larger target with no problem, except that the extra sectors on the target would remain unused. In other words, it's not necessary to have identical drives in both systems. Just make sure that your source image is < or = to the target drive.

Re:g4u source code mirror

[BlueUnderwear]

server.sh:
cat /dev/hda | nc -l -p 5030

client.sh:
nc server 5030 > /dev/hda

This works fine, as long as you have only one receiver (client). No imagine a school who wants to image a whole classroom of 25 machines at once. Your solution will consume 25 times the bandwidth, because it will open 25 point-to-point links!

A better solution would be to use udpcast [linux.lu] which uses Ethernet's multicast abilities to allow all PC's to be loaded from the same stream of data.

SystemImager

[FredGray]

We [uiuc.edu] have about 50 Debian boxes, all installed with Systemimager [systemimager.org]. Basically, it uses EtherBoot [etherboot.org] to load a kernel/initrd over the network, then uses rsync [rsync.org] to do most of the heavy lifting. We had to make a few local customizations, but it has worked quite well for us.