Hi,

I am looking at designing a smallish network comprising linux servers with linux and windows clients. I would like to be able to manage the client desktop images centrally, so that I can make necessary updates/fixes before pushing them out to the clients.

From reading, it appears I can just use rsync to manage the linux desktop images. In this case, only the differences between the updated master image and client image will be updated.

My question is how would I push out a master windows XP image to clients? I'd like to use rsync, but don't think NTFS write support is supported.

Any help would be much appreciated.

When you talk about images are you refering to an image of an entire system? Have you looked at partimage and dd?

Thanks for the reply David,

I'm actually refering to an image of an entire system, so that patches, apps can all be applied to a master copy of a SOE which is then pushed/pulled to the clients.

After looking around I think a PXE boot of the linux systems or TFTP will be the best way to go - may also look at multicasting to speed things up.

As for windows, the issue lies in NTFS write support for linux and Windows machine ID's (which need to be manually re-written after a re-image). Ghost appears the best solution as it handles the machine ID conflict, but the admin still needs to walk around to every machine and use the ghost boot floppy to kick things off...

Any other suggestions?

Thanks...

If you take an image of the disk then it really doesn't matter what filesystem you use as the data is never read or written from the filesystem.

Are you referring to solutions like windows SMS services and Novel ZEN works, where you can push out system patches and application a certain times?

If that is the case, then I don't have a good solution. The solution suggested by david_ross is the equivalent of Norton Ghost in the windows world. Programs that doesn't care anything about filesystems and other higher level aspects of the harddisk, but only look at the actual raw data written to the disk.

I am after a "ghost"-like solution for linux (abstracting the filesystem), where you point at a source disk or partition to image to a destination disk or partition. I'd love if this can be done centrally, but it seems that no solutions exist.

partimage has the functionality of taking and restoring images of partitions, and it also has a server/client functionality.
Unfortunately it doesn't fully support NTFS file system yet.

I have been playing with partimage off the System Rescue CD and the only problems with ntfs that i have would be if i was dealing with SATA drives.

have you looked into

G4U (Ghost 4 Unix) http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

or

G4L (Ghost 4 Linux) http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l