Radified Community Forums - Linux hard drive, ghost capable?

tripflex

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Linux hard drive, ghost capable?
Jul 30^th, 2007 at 3:17pm

Alright, got a question for you guys...

Basically i have about 500 SBC(Single Board Computers -- which include the SBC, laptop hard drive, and power supply). They are about as minimal as you can get, with no cdrom, floppy, etc. All they have is USB, 2 NIC ports, serial, vga, and keyboard/mouse.

Anyways, basically i have one unit that has been configured to the way we need the other 499 configured. It would take way too long to configure each one so we need to clone the hard drive of the original on to the other ones.

So, the machine that is already configured is running Fedora (version of linux) and i cannot figure out a way that we make an image of that hard drive then clone it onto all the other ones.

Ideally what i'm looking for is to have a usb flash drive that i can plug in each machine which would then boot up the blue ghost screen which i could then clone the hard drive off of a network.

This is where i need some help...maybe you guys can possibly help me out with this because we have a lot of these machines to do, and a lot more in the future we will have to do.

Thanks for everyone's help and suggestions!

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MrMagoo

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Re: Linux hard drive, ghost capable?
Reply #1 - Jul 30^th, 2007 at 6:22pm

The biggest questions is: What filesystem are you running on the hard drive? I think that Ghost is capable of imagining ext2 and ext3 but not very many other Linux filesystems.

You could run Ghost off a bootable CD. Make a bootable CD using NightOwl's guide. Get an external CD-ROM that connects to your SBC's via USB (enough TLA's for you?) and then make the image that way. You could store the image on an external hard drive, via network or USB.

If you are using a filesystem that Ghost doesn't support, we'll help you find another imaging program.

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NightOwl

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Re: Linux hard drive, ghost capable?
Reply #2 - Jul 30^th, 2007 at 11:31pm

Myles

Quote:

Ideally what i'm looking for is to have a usb flash drive that i can plug in each machine which would then boot up the blue ghost screen which i could then clone the hard drive off of a network.

Okay--you've stated the goal--now we have to work out the details Wink

!

Do these machines have the ability to boot from a USB Flash Drive? That would be a necessary basic requirement. Do you know how to create a bootable flash drive that boots to DOS? Once you have that, then it's just a matter of figuring out how to set DOS up to access the network.

By the way, cloning over a network may be somewhat slow. Hooking up the drives temporarily as a slave drive for cloning on the template system might go faster.

Second possibility--temporary use of a USB floppy drive--or maybe a USB CD-Rom drive--to boot each machine.

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Myles

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Re: Linux hard drive, ghost capable?
Reply #3 - Jul 31^st, 2007 at 10:01am

Alright, yes they do have the possibility to boot from USB, the options available in bios are to (USB FDD, USB CDROM, USB ZIP). I've tried to do it before and there are no problems booting with usb device.

Now, on to the part of making a bootable USB, i have found numerous articles on the internet on how to make the USB bootable, i found a couple different ways with either some version of live linux and then a msdos way. I wasn't too sure which way i wanted to go with it...

The only reason i wanted to do it over a network was because that way i could have 10-20 of them running at once instead of having to do them one by one, especially when we have about 500 of them to do.

I'm not really sure what filesystem they have? I'm not familiar with ext2/ext3? Could you possibly give me a little more information on that

Thanks guys!

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NightOwl

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Re: Linux hard drive, ghost capable?
Reply #4 - Jul 31^st, 2007 at 10:29am

Myles

Quote:

Now, on to the part of making a bootable USB, i have found numerous articles on the internet on how to make the USB bootable, i found a couple different ways with either some version of live linux and then a msdos way. I wasn't too sure which way i wanted to go with it...

What version of Ghost are you using? DOS Ghost can not be booted or loaded from a linux OS boot disk--nor can one of the more recent Ghost versions (9, 10, Save & Restore, or 12) that depend on Windows to operate.

Quote:

The only reason i wanted to do it over a network was because that way i could have 10-20 of them running at once instead of having to do them one by one, especially when we have about 500 of them to do.

Unless you have the Corporate Ghost product that can function as a Ghost Server and that can do *Ghost Casting*, I think you will only be able to do one machine at a time over a network--you will have a *master* as source and a *slave* as destination.

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MrMagoo

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Re: Linux hard drive, ghost capable?
Reply #5 - Jul 31^st, 2007 at 2:42pm

Quote:

I'm not really sure what filesystem they have? I'm not familiar with ext2/ext3? Could you possibly ive me a little more information on that

When you installed Linux, you had to partition and format the hard drive. How did you format it? What type of formatting did you use? ext3 is the most popular Linux disk format, or file system, but there are many others.

If you have no idea how the system was installed, probably the easiest thing would be to post the contents of the /etc/fstab file and I'll be able tell the file system type from that.

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nbree

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Re: Linux hard drive, ghost capable?
Reply #6 - Jul 31^st, 2007 at 9:32pm

Quote:

The only reason i wanted to do it over a network was because that way i could have 10-20 of them running at once instead of having to do them one by one, especially when we have about 500 of them to do.

This is actually "classic" Ghost's true party piece. The corporate edition can easily do all 500 at the same time, at basically the same speed it does just one. That does tend to require that you have a suitable network infrastructure, mind you, so building a network to do that takes some planning.

The one weakness of the corporate version with respect to Linux at present is that we don't have a Linux version of the client for our central management console, though, so if you do use Linux a lot some of the most useful features of the corporate version won't be much use to you. It's still good for the initial deployment though, especially in connection with using the bundled PXE server (here's a customer talking about how they use it) so you can just plug the machines in and network boot them instead of using a floppy. With these small machines you have it's worth checking specifically that they have a PXE-capable system BIOS so you can network boot them into a centrally controlled environment.

Also note that the quoted license price has some big volume breaks; at 500 it's less than half the base price per seat - that's directly from Symantec, but maybe some of the channel partners have better deals than that.

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