Ghost for Unix 285
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)."
Alternatives (Score:4, Insightful)
Good on the chap who wrote it.
I definantly will be using this in future.
Huff
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
The only problem with Ghost is the licensing cost.
Ghost doesn't work with non-PC's... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ghost doesn't work with non-PC's... (Score:2)
Re:Alternatives (Score:3, Insightful)
That means that you can only restore an image to a disk in equal or larger size than that of the dump. It also means that if you have a larger disk you'll find that you'll end up with unused space or perhaps worse, a boot sector in the wrong place so that you can't even boot your system.
I do believe that this project has the ability to go further at some point, but right now, I see it as a NetBSD boot floppy with network drivers and a ramdisk which has dd(1).
Re:Alternatives (Score:3, Informative)
Udpcast [linux.lu] handles any filesystem just fine. Indeed, it reads directly from the device, and is thus able to handle even filesystems that are not supported by Linux. And in order to handle the case of "almost empty" partition, it supports compressed transfers: the empty, zero-filled sectors compress to almost nothing, and thus don't consume any bandwidth.
Does anyone have first hand experience? (Score:2)
It's too bad that it won't allow you to resize partitions, as you can with Ghost but, it looks like a great start, so long as it isn't too slow.
Crimony (Score:2)
Re:Does anyone have first hand experience? (Score:2, Insightful)
This type of program isn't marketed towards the standard computer consumer, it's marketed towards server operators and up.
g4u source code mirror (Score:5, Funny)
cat
client.sh:
nc server 5030 >
Re:g4u source code mirror (Score:2)
Re:g4u source code mirror (Score:2)
That leaves the hda free to be repartitioned, etc.
I'm pretty sure that's how the orginal author intended
Re:g4u source code mirror (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:g4u source code mirror (Score:2)
Bug report (Score:2)
Re:Bug report (Score:2)
- Hubert
Re:g4u source code mirror (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
use multicast rsync (Score:2)
A technically better solution is probably to use multicast rsync, either on the raw partition, or on the mounted file system. Using it on a mounted file system has the advantage that it works on live file systems, can deal with different drive geometries, and doesn't waste any time copying free blocks that still contain data.
If you do use "nc", there are two things you should do first: (1) clear out any free data on the source partitions by "cat /dev/zero > junk; rm junk" (this will improve compression), and (2) use gzip, as in "gzip /dev/hda".
Oops -- HTML quoting wrong (Score:2)
Re:g4u source code mirror (Score:2, Informative)
Name : nc Relocations: (not relocateable)
Version : 1.10 Vendor: MandrakeSoft
Release : 15mdk Build Date: Wed 11 Jul 2001 07:30:43 AM PDT
Install date: Sun 03 Feb 2002 01:39:29 PM PST Build Host: bi.mandrakesoft.com
Group : Networking/Other Source RPM: nc-1.10-15mdk.src.rpm
Size : 117756 License: GPL
Packager : Mandrake Linux Team <bugs@linux-mandrake.com>
URL : http://www.l0pht.com/~weld/netcat
Summary : Reads and writes data across network connections using TCP or UDP.
Description
The nc package contains Netcat (the program is now netcat), a simple
utility for reading and writing data across network connections, using
the TCP or UDP protocols. Netcat is intended to be a reliable back-end
tool which can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and
scripts. Netcat is also a feature-rich network debugging and exploration
tool, since it can create many different connections and has many
built-in capabilities.
You may want to install the netcat package if you are administering a
network and you'd like to use its debugging and network exploration
capabilities.
Re:g4u source code mirror (Score:4, Informative)
you should install it, its probably one of the most useful netowrk utilities ever written.
Make that "old skool BSD license" (Score:3, Informative)
From the article:
This form of the BSD license has a minor problem [gnu.org].
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Setting the record straight (Score:2, Informative)
To clear up any misconceptions that the sarcastic parent comment might have created:
GPL gets around this by asking that you give them the copyright and give them all the credit leaving you with none.
Actually, every author of a GPL program gets credit. The GNU GPL [gnu.org], section 2, requires that "You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change." Thus, the credit stays where it belongs, in the source code, documentation, and (for interactive programs) the about box, rather than in possibly unrelated advertising.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Make that "old skool BSD license" (Score:2)
If the FreeBSD team didn't decide to change licencing, every single advertisement (including banners, for example) of FreeBSD would have to exhaustively elencate all of the contributors, thus making any sort of advertisement pratically impossibile.
Mr. Huber Freyer can get away advertising his work without much hassle exactly because he doesn't have also to list all FreeBSD contributors (since they changed their mind).
Requiring due credit is fine. Pretending to have your name to be written even on your distributor's underwear is definitively too much, and this is what the old advertising clause basically asks for.
Re:Make that "old skool BSD license" (Score:2)
Addenda: to furtherly demonstrate how silly that clause is, I'd also want to point out that while Mr. Huber Freyer requires his acknowledgement to be displayed in all advertising material, he is not displaying anywhere in his page the required acknowledgement (as the NetBSD license still requires) regarding the University of California, but simply tells his software is based on NetBSD.
Now: is he giving due credit? Yes. Is he doing it in the form required by the NetBSD license? No. Is that clause silly? Yes.
Re:Make that "old skool BSD license" (Score:5, Informative)
The GPL does nothing of the sort. Nowhere in the GPL is the request made for contributors to sign over their copyrights. Just the opposite is true. Contributors retain copyrights over contributed code that is their own creation. The GPL states that contributors of derivitive code must grant others the full right to copy, modify, and distribute those derivitive contributions. That's it.
You are probably confusing the GPL with the FSF's advice to assign it the copyright to your GPL'd code that you wish to have legally defended by the FSF (under the assumption that you are not financially able to enforce your copyrights yourself). Nowhere is this a requirement.
Likewise, there is no provision in the GPL to strip you of credit for contributions you have made. Once again, quite the opposite is true. The GPL goes to great length to make sure you are properly attributed and that recognition for your contributions is not usurped.
The GPL has been carefully crafted to protect the rights of authors without imposing unnecessary burdens on contributors of derivitive works. The only inconvenience I have ever noticed with the GPL was experienced from a proprietary software perspective. And that was a primary purpose of the GPL: to make life difficult for those who want to steal the works of others, while making life easier for those who want to build upon the works of others and contribute those improvements back to the world.
The GPL works wonderfully and is a thing of beauty.
Re:Make that "old skool BSD license" (Score:2)
on the off chance you stuck a reading lamp up your ass before planting your head in it...
first, the gpl does not require you to assign copyright to "them." what you probably mean is that the fsf *REQUESTS* that you grant them copyright to gpl'd software (you still retain your own). this way if someone violates your copyright, you can tell the fsf and they'll go sic their lawyers on the violator. the courts won't listen to the fsf if they don't haven't been assigned status by the authors. likewise, lawyers are expensive so the fsf is doing you a *FAVOUR* by offering to do that for authors of gpl'd software.
secondly the gpl requires authors to maintain credit within source files. not advertising, but credits in the source files have to stay.
Re:Make that "old skool BSD license" (Score:3, Informative)
Exellent! (Score:4, Insightful)
Cloning PC-Unix boxes (Linux, etc), doesn't really require any special software though... When I need a new node for our EDA cluster, I boot tomsrbt, and run fdisk, and then kick off a script that pulls down an
--
Matt
Re:Exellent! (Score:3, Informative)
Ghost 2003 also handles local CD-R, USB, USB2 and Firewire disks, and can write an image file to a local NTFS disk, which is a neat trick for a DOS program.
The bigger challenge with the latest version of ghost is remembering where the hell you put the bootdisk you need, since you can't get all the features on the same disk (e.g. no LanMan client + USB2 support).
Ghost is what lets me do other things while I'm at work besides fix PCs.
I license ghost @ something like $11 a copy for all the PCs I'm in charge of, and given the time-savings, it paid for itself in about two weeks.
Still, this looks really good. I like free. I'll probably give it a try next week.
This is very nice (Score:2, Insightful)
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. It's so nice to see someone develop an open and free version that recaptures the original idea - just copy the fricken hard disk already!
Re:This is very nice (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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.
Re:This is very nice (Score:2)
The prospect of either manually resizing, or dumping and re-creating several partitions is a headache I'd much sooner live without.
Creating and maintaining eight identical workstation images with the only difference being the size of the HDD costs a lot of time (money) and server storage, not to mention far too much administrative overhead. If I want to image 100 workstations, I'd prefer to associate them in LCCM and instruct them to 'go', or tell the Ghost MultiCast server which workstations to image and have it fire away. Running 6+ multicast sessions either takes six times as long, else runs at 1/6th the speed.
It's lunch-hour, you have to have 75 machines re-imaged and useable by the end of lunch. Choose your application wisely.
Ghost's ability to back up a workstation onto CDR discs (@ 650, 700, or 800MB) which can be booted and restoring your disk in one easy shot is also a fantastic feature. Backing up a laptop to a connected USB HDD is another example of phenominal functionality.
G4U seems like a nice novelty, and perhaps a good way to back up your home workstation, but I don't forsee it ever replacing even a small portion of Ghost's utility.
Paramount (Score:5, Funny)
You should do a trademark search at the patent and trademark office [uspto.gov] before releasing infringing software.
Only if it's the same size disk (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Only if it's the same size disk (Score:2)
Hey, and SSH with barts disk works great, thou you miss multiple ttys.
Re:Only if it's the same size disk (Score:2)
If you are looking for a single machine or small numbers of machines to do backup and restore, bart and g4u are great! I used g4u when my lab was homogenous, and it was perfect. I still need multicasting and tar or xfsdump support that is user friendly. It's best I write my own
Re:Only if it's the same size disk (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Only if it's the same size disk (Score:2)
Not necessarily: if the drive geometries differ, you may well be in trouble.
Re:Only if it's the same size disk (Score:2)
Speaking from experience, this never caused us a problem. Granted, all the machines we cloned used FAT partitions (they were all NT and OS/2 machines--we're talking about 4 years back.) No, we didn't use NTFS or HPFS on workstations because we needed to be able to access the files from DOS in the event that the OS got fubared. I can't say for certain how drive geometry would affect other types of OS's/filesystems.
use rsync or multicast rsync (Score:2)
In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Ugh, RMS in a pink shirt and a smile. Thanks for sticking that image in my brain.
graspee
speed increase? (Score:2)
Speed increase? How about rsync? (Score:2)
It would probably be instructive to try rsync anyway. It dramatically slashes the transfer time even on compressed CDs (e.g. Mandrake Cooker CD's a few subreleases apart).
Setting that aside and turning to multiple clients, having a `what-do-I-need' MD5 broadcasting session followed by a multicast or broadcast of the required blocks (and refrain, in case a client missed anything) would probably save a lot of bandwidth except on initial installs where every answer would be `I need everything'. You could invent a nifty little sparse-blocks reply algorithm that listed ranges in the simple case and bitmaps on messy sections.
Ghost is worth the money (Score:5, Informative)
The multicast console kicks ass -- I can ghost a tonne of workstations at one time and not kill the network.
Symantecs' support infrastructure is wicked too. We haven't hit a problem that wasn't documented on their website yet.
Also, ghost understands filesystems and not raw blocks. 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. Ghost 7.5 can understand fat/ntfs/ext2 and ext3. It can also do raw reads of the hard disk.
btw, I don't work for symantec.
Wipe every free block for great compression (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Wipe every free block for great compression (Score:2)
"cat /dev/zero > junk; rm junk" will do the trick (if you don't believe me, try it).
Sparse files (Score:2, Informative)
[A file made of all zeroes] should leave us with very compressible freespace, right?
I suggested a repeating pattern rather than zeroes because some UNIX systems represent an all-zero file cluster by not allocating the cluster at all. A file that contains such a cluster is called a "sparse file".
Re:Sparse files (Score:2)
Not when writeing these zeroes. Sparse files are created by skipping over the sectors (using fseek), and then actually writing the last sector. Or, alternatively, by truncating the file to a bigger size than it currently is.
The cat /dev/zero >hugefile trick won't create a sparse file. But be careful with it on certain older versions of reiserfs: these can't deal with 100% full disks, and may mix up a couple of files in the process.
Re:Ghost is worth the money (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, it is good that ghost understands filesystems. But it is also good that ghost would work nicely on raw data. Why? For forensics, to copy unmovable data (in relation to the disk itself), to mirror disks where data is partially damaged. At the time I tried, Ghost was "acceptable" on this level but it had some problems.
Anyway, for those who would like to work nicely without caring for many hassles about how these things work, ghost is probably the best choice.
Re:Ghost is worth the money (Score:2)
Without question, this is one of the coolest features of Ghost. Without it, g4u isn't even an option for me. I work in an educational environment where we're using the same images on four different hardware configurations with a bunch of wildly different HD sizes. We're already stretching the capacity of our Ghost Servers (yep, plural. Three sites.). Needing a different image for each type of HD would require Terabytes of additional storage, not to mention increase our administrative overhead by an order of magnitude.
I've never seen a production environment where all the HDs were identical. Because it understands files, Ghost can deal with the real world in a clean and elegant manner.
Until g4u understands filesystems and supports multicast, it's not even worth considering for most scenarios.
Re:Ghost is worth the money (Score:2)
Yeah, but Linux tools such as udpcast [linux.lu] can do this too, and much faster as well (70 Mbps on a 100 Mbps network!)
Also, ghost understands filesystems and not raw blocks. 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.
Point granted. However, udpcast is able to compress the data from the disk before it sends it out to the network, thus mitigating the effect of "almost empty" partitions. Those unused sectors will most probably be full of binary zeroes, which compress to almost nothing.
Improving the value of notGhosts (Score:2)
And if not, just run over it with SecureDelete's [freshmeat.net] wipe-the-empty-space utility. If you don't have that to hand, this command will do near enough:
You'll need to run those once on every real partition.
Re:Ghost is worth the money (Score:2)
If your machine has been broken into, you want to save the entire hard drive image, including "blank" space verbatum for forensic purposes before you wipe the disk and reinstall everything.
Also, what if you're runnig *BSD, Solais x86, or you're using xfs, reiserfs, cramfs (on a flash drive or microdrive)? Spritefs and lfs give you better write performance. I hate to break it to you, but 4 filesystems may not cover everyone's needs. Alse, there's the issue of encrypted partitions. (Not the file-level encryption that ships with windows now, but real partition-lelvel encryption.)
If you put raw disk images back on the disk you have the advantage of overwriting the old file data instead of just marking the blocks as unused.
I'm sure that for most windows shops, Ghosts does everything they want and is fact more useful than opaque data transfer. However, don't be so quick to dismiss the advantages of raw partition transfer and storage.
fli4l and ncftp (Score:2, Interesting)
Note: ncftp can directly read and write
The rest should be easy to set up. You could automate it by writing scripts with ncftpbatch.
Good for clusters (Score:2)
Re:Good for clusters (Score:2)
I did a 45-machine cluster with g4u, see
www.feyrer.de/marathon-cluster/
(Of course the machines were running NetBSD too, doing a video rendering job)
- Hubert
Partition Image (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Partition Image (Score:2)
Partition image is also nice as a rescue disk.
Re:Partition Image (Score:2)
Welcome, but I still screwed it up (Score:2)
Re:Welcome, but I still screwed it up (Score:2)
Did you use different disk sizes in the process?
Reply by mail preferred (hubert@feyrer.de).
Thanks!
- Hubert
Re:Welcome, but I still screwed it up (Score:2)
Quick File Distribution Challenge on Advogato (Score:2, Interesting)
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... :)
Partition Image (Score:5, Informative)
We've been using it to clone our NT based workstations at work for some time now and it kicks ass! It copes quite happily with NTFS(!), FAT16/32, Ext2/3, ReiserFS etc etc...
It's a client/server program and they provide a bootable ISO image on their site (saves you having to create one if you're lazy like me) ;). You can also compress the image taken using either gzip or bzip compression.
HP has it for quite some time already (Score:2, Interesting)
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 >
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. (Score:5, Interesting)
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
DOES NOT WORK (Score:2)
wd0: transfer error, downgrading to PIO mode 4
wd0(pciide0:0:1): using PIO mode 4
wd0d: error reading fsbn 56960 of 56960-57087 (wd0 bn 569760; cn 60 tn 4 sn 8); retrying
dd:
27+0 records in
27+0 records out
28311552 bytes transferred in 41.015 secs (690273 bytes/sec)
226 Transfer complete.
8087791 bytes sent in 00:37 (211.08 KB/s)
221 Goodbye.
rm: not found
#
Any help?
Re:DOES NOT WORK (Score:2)
After that, you should be able to deploy the disk image.
- Hubert
Another One (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.bablokb.de/reccd/index.html [bablokb.de]
Great (Score:2, Funny)
Come on, there IS a reason people pay for ghost. I for one, would like some assurance that I can clone disks that aren't exactly identical..
Re:Great (Score:2)
dd writes to the network the same way it reads from the disk: standard I/O, with kernel support for the I/O methods it needs. I do my backups with a stock NetBSD boot disk and dd to an NFS partition. So nyeah.
Re:Great (Score:2)
But that way you can't do any multicast [linux.lu]. If you now want to restore your image on a whole classroom of PC's at once, each of the receiver PC's will ask for each sector on its own, and the whole thing slows down to a crawl. Not to mention that even with only one machine, NFS's performance is not exactly stellar...
I fail to see anything new here? (Score:3, Informative)
I can see no discernable difference between this and any bootable Linux CD with 'dd', 'gzip', and 'nc' or 'ssh' installed. The reason people buy Ghost is that it resizes partitions, and this doesn't have any of that.
Am I missing something? Is there something on their page that I didn't see as I read through? Is there a demand for new and unfamiliar commands for doing familiar things?
This is not a troll - this is honest curiosity. I've used Partition Image, which is similar, and don't use it for pretty much the same reason - nothing added. On the other hand, I've used multiple bootable distributions (linuxcare, superrescue, @stake) to make disk images using dd/gzip/nc/ssh/md5sum. Cake.
Re:I fail to see anything new here? (Score:3, Insightful)
But why spend an afternoon surfing the web for alternatives to Ghost, DriveImage and friends when you can rewrite your own version from which you know what it does, and while there get famous on
- Hubert
P.S.: Does Ghost etc. support Gigabit Ethernet? USB Ethernet? Token Ring? No? Of course not - have fun finding the necessary DOS drivers.
See the g4u webpage for reasons why I wrote this.
Re:I fail to see anything new here? (Score:2)
Does Ghost etc. support Gigabit Ethernet? USB Ethernet? Token Ring? No? Of course not - have fun finding the necessary DOS drivers.
Hell, Ghost barely supports most laptops with pcmcia ether. But that hasn't stopped it from being the tool of choice for IT departments, because they want to take an image made on machine hardware X and be able to blow it onto machine hardware X.0.1.
I wonder, though, if you could boot a Unix CD with the appropriate weird network driver and then run Ghost under dosemu or something like that... All it wants is net and disk, why not? That doesn't solve your problem with finding a Unix server, but it would be an interesting experiment.
In any case, congratulations for making it onto /., and for having your server survive...
Ghost 7.5 experience (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Seeing visitors to the site (Score:2, Funny)
Cheers,
Moz.
SystemImager (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:hmms (Score:5, Informative)
Re:hmms (Score:2)
I wrote a utility for Solaris boxen that uses ufsdump and ufsrestore to do the same (as well as copying the disk layout (format.dat) via the format command). All mounted slices get gzipped and can be stored on NFS-mounted drives. When you restore, you can specify a different disk layout by changing the format.dat file prior to the restore. It takes about a half hour to dump a full solaris install with about a gig of other applications/data on the drive. Total image size is about 1.5 Gig.
I plan on writing a Linux flavor of the same utility, but dealing with icky PC drive formats will be a LOT harder than with SPARC Solaris drives.
ALL NICs. (Score:2)
My idea is to produce a utility like this with all autoloadeble NIC drivers included. Of course it would practicaly be aLinux distribution andwouldneed a CD for those files but so what?
PS: Away to have it produce a floppy with just the right driver once it gets a working combination would be cool.
Low level error correction (Score:3, Insightful)
isn't there a big chance that some bits would get corrupted?
Modern storage devices use error correction at a very low level. For instance, CD-ROM has three error-correcting codes: two in the CD layer [washington.edu] and one in the sector layer. In addition, a partition could be written to multiple discs in a manner similar to RAID 5, such that every fifth disc stored an xor of the four previous discs.
Re:Seems like a good idea. (Score:3, Informative)
The only way to work around that is to add some intelligence WRT file systems, which is exactly what tools like ghost etc. do. g4u does not do so to remain simple, and be able to clone _any_ operating system or combination of operating systems. See the web page for more background!
2. bit corruption:
do you trust your harddisk to give you back the bits you hand it over? I do, and if we can't do that one day, we all have a problem.
- Hubert
Re:Ghost will not work... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ghost will not work... (Score:2, Informative)
In fact, you can see the computer accounts using ADSI (point your ADSI browser to WinNT://yourdomain). They just have $ at the end. The account gets created when someone with Account Operator privs adds the machine to the domain.
Anyway, the computer and domain negotiate a new random password every x weeks... you'll see this if you ever ghost a machine and then restore the ghost image several weeks later--you'll have to re-add the machine to the domain, because the password is expired and the machine's account gets locked out.
You get a cookie. (Score:2)
Re:Ghost will not work... (Score:5, Informative)
But local accounts don't disappear when you join a domain; you'll still have the kind of cloned-SID-related security problems with your local accounts that you would in workgroup mode. Suppose you reset the local administrator password on some power user's machine so they can use the account to, say, do their own software installations. Since the SID is the same on all the cloned machines, the local administrator account UID will be the same, so local administrator permissions on all the machines with the cloned SID will "leak" to the user even though they've only authenticated for the local admin account on their own machine.
Free utility changes the SID. (Score:3, Informative)
The SID is easily changed using a free utility: SysInternals [sysinternals.com] provides a free utility, NewSID [sysinternals.com], to change the SID.
Re:Cold feet (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cold feet (Score:2)
solaris: jumpstart.
Re:Cold feet (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, here's a few, and there's many more from whence these came:
Bzzt! Ghost walker works great!! (Score:3, Informative)
Thanks for playing.
Re:It can't support Windows (Score:2, Informative)
Works For Me (Score:2)
I'm interested in this, because at the moment, I need to use one of the Windows clients to generate/push images. I'd also like something that could work for MacOS (9.x, unfortunately, since we use Quark).
Re:This is the perfect backup tool (Score:2)
Kind of like a Rube Goldberg contest for doing mundane day-to-day system maintenance tasks!
Re:Disk to Disk Cloning? (Score:2)
For now you can do:
dd if=/dev/rwd0d of=/dev/rwd1d bs=1m progress=1
(Yeah, that's Unix! I will give you a shell wrapper in g4u 1.9. Suggestions for a name, anyone?
- Hubert