Hi all,

Possibly a silly question.

Can I Ghost a linux box?

Ok, here goes... At work, I have a Ghost server. Anytime we want to make an image of a machine, we simply find a bootable ghost floppy with a copy of the driver of the NIC in the machine we want to ghost. In other words, if we want to ghost an XP machine with a 3COM 3905, we find a floppy we made (presumably months or years ago) with a 3905 driver on it.

We then boot said machine from that floppy, and the Ghost client starts. After telling the Ghost server to look over multicast, we then ghost the machine and seperate it into 650MB splits so that the image is thus broken up onto CD's.

Obviously, this works for Windows.

My question is if it would work with my linux server?

I mean, I don't see why not. Ghost doesn't care what's ON the machine, it simply compresses the hell out of everything and makes an image. Right?

This way, if my server ever dies, I can simply boot from, I dunno, a Win98 boot disk (or my emergency linux boot disk), get to a prompt where I can execute the ghost.exe file and simply remake my server from the Ghost image.

Will this work?

Chris

I am not sure about Norton Ghost, it may have limitations re: filesystem types.... dunno

I am quite happy with g4l (ghost for linux). You should check it out. You'll find other's too if you do some searching.

cheers

Shouldn't matter, as long as ghost is booting from a dos/win environment. I use it at work all the time, and we just have a simple dos floppy with the right dos driver and a script to mount the network drive that contains all of our images. All you are saving is the drive image, so I don't imagine that it would be a problem.

edit: as long as you're putting the image on a drive that dos/ghost recognizes, ie fat

This could be very interesting, indeed. Never heard of it.

On my home network, my RH8 machine is the server/router, and I have several XP boxes on the LAN. Could I use g4l and send the images it creates (in 650MB splits) to one of the windows machines, then just burn the CD's from there?

Chris

Basically, yeah.

Well, the ghost serer at work is ntfs. But why would that matter? It simply creates .gho then .ghs files that are then burned to CD. I'd imagine the file system the ghost server uses wouldn't matter. Yes? No?

Chris

nilleso?

Could you kind of walk me through how g4l works? Can I send an image to one of the other windows machines on the network (via an IP address, perhaps) so that I can burn them to CD?

Chris

G4L is setup to create an image onto an ftp server, and that can be on any machine. Only thing that you need to be careful of, is to make sure that it will support large files. Many ftp server will not go larger than 2GB. The other problem that you will run into, is that the images will not fit on a single CD or probable a single DVD. You want to make sure to clear all unused sectors before doing an image, since dd copies all sectors, and sectors that are cleared take much less space.

My computer lab systems with 80GB drives and 3 OS's, 98, XP, and Fedora, take about 14GB for the image. So, I could probable do an image of each seperate OS, and put it on a DVD, but I have a server with a 250GB drive for storing all the images, and then copy the image to another system with a 70GB drive.

Check out the freshmeat site, and if you still have questions, drop a note.

Cool. So do I need some kind of ftp server program RUNNING on another machine in my LAN in order for g4l to see it?

True, but it seems to me that g4l supports splitting of images into any size under 2GB. I plan on splitting the image into 650MB sizes so as to fit them onto CD's. I assume that would work. Right?

Gimme a process here, please. I can install g4l from the command line, correct? I can run it from command line, correct? Will I have an option before starting the ghost to send it to said ftp server, and does some ftp server software need to be running elsewhere, first? If so, how does g4l find it? Do I need to stop server services (apache, bind, dhcp, samba, sendmail, etc...) before ghosting? Oh, and one last thing. Could you explain to me how to recover if I should have a catastrophe? Is the first CD in the splits bootable? Or do I use my recovery floppy to start?

Sorry for all the questions, but I just don't want to screw this up.

Thanks a million, mate.

Chris

G4l runs from the bootable cd, but no image file exists on the cd. In one mode, it creates a single file to an ftp server that contains the whole image, and this can be restore from the ftp server. You could then split that file, and copy the parts to CD or a removable drive. It does have a split option in g4l, but I have never used it myself.

You could also do a local image to a removable drive that could be mounted from the g4l cd, this would get around the 650MB or DVD size.

Thanks, mate. I'll play with it.

Chris

No, Not if you are changing your Drive deff. (going to a larger size or diff int drive).

NoStop (member), pointed us to this product, Acronis which I've orderd.

Landis.

It's correct that g4l, g4u, and udpcast do not allow one to resize the partition ad imaging time, but there are various tools linked to the OS and type of partitions that allow this. I don't know if Acronis supports linux fully, but Norton ghost worked until Fedora Core 3, and then it fails on create an image.

I had used ghost 9 for quite some time until a bug caused it to fail, and I'm near to reinstalling and getting it working again. I really liked it.

Currently I use a software called R-Drive Image that also says it recognizes linux and ext2 and ext3 along with the standard microsoft partitions, and I've been successful in using it. What is interesting is that I can sucessfully backup rieserfs partitions and restore them as well. I suspect ghost will be able to handle them as well. I would do a test backup and restore to make sure.