Linux disk image server

SchoolITguy · 07-14-2004, 06:34 PM

Does any one know if there is a server software for linux that would do operating system disk imaging for windows clients. With the ability to just over the network download a new disk image of the operating system. Basically how symantec ghost corparate edition works.

Thanks,
Kevin

J.W. · 07-14-2004, 08:09 PM

Check out the man pages for the dd command. It will do a block by block copy, and if you wanted to copy the contents of disk A to disk B, the basic command would simply be

Code:

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb

There are a number of parameters you can set to specify the block size, etc, but I believe that dd should perform what you describe. -- J.W.

SchoolITguy · 07-15-2004, 07:44 AM

This doesn't sound like it would help with doing it on the network for windows clients. Or am I way off on this? I will read up about you said I thank you for the help.

Kevin

homey · 07-15-2004, 08:00 AM

Here's a promising lead which I saw in a thread the other day. Haven't had a chance to do much with it yet. I downloaded the cd version because it seemed likely to hold more nic drivers than a floppy.
http://www.udpcast.linux.lu/

SchoolITguy · 07-15-2004, 02:27 PM

Ok I have been looking into this for a couple of hours and I am more confused than a baby in a topless bar! How exactly is this suppose to work? I couldn't get the cdrecord command to work, or the xdfcopy (yes I downloaded the program). I did manage to make a boot floppy and boot off of it. But now what, there doesn't seem to much documentation on how to use this program. I was hoping you had better luck. Any help would be great.

Thanks,
Kevin

homey · 07-15-2004, 03:03 PM

The cdrecord example which they give is only an example. If you run the command: cdrecord --scanbus you can see what your device is. On my linux box, it looks like this...

Code:

Cdrecord-Clone 2.01a19 (i686-redhat-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 1995-2003 J�rg Schilling
Using libscg version 'schily-0.7'
scsibus0:
	0,0,0	  0) 'SONY    ' 'CD-RW  CRX120E  ' '1.0j' Removable CD-ROM
	0,1,0	  1) *
	0,2,0	  2) *
	0,3,0	  3) *
	0,4,0	  4) *
	0,5,0	  5) *
	0,6,0	  6) *
	0,7,0	  7) *

Using that information, especially the 0,0,0 part , I can run this command to make the bootable cdrom.....
cdrecord -v speed=4 dev=0,0,0 -data udpcd26.img

Actually, I made two cdroms, One is booted up as the image server. ( sender )
The second cdrom is booted up on the client machine and set as the reciever.

It works pretty slick IMHO

SchoolITguy · 07-15-2004, 11:14 PM

Thanks for the help, I never did get the cdrecorder to work. I kept getting an error /dev/sg* doesn't not exist. But is was able to burn the image on a windows machine. I have got it to work, and we tested it on 3 computers and it worked great. Tomorrow we are going to try half of an elementary school (about 50 computers) and see how it works. Thanks for sharing this information it is working great. I was thinking about using an old computer with a hard drive having multiple partitons. All with images for different comuters. When I need to reimage a machine I will just boot off of the cd and select the hda partition that I need. Man that will make things easier, if it works I will post and let you know.

Thanks again for the help
Kevin

homey · 07-15-2004, 11:42 PM

Cool!

That idea about using partitions for different systems is interesting. I haven't tried that yet. If you have an OS setup on /dev/hda3 for example and image it over to a client machine at /dev/hda1, then you would need to adust the grub config and /etc/fstab files. Other than that it out to work well.

Edit: Guess I got carried away thinking Linux.

If you are only imaging windows systems, you would need to worry about swap and grub.conf

SchoolITguy · 07-16-2004, 09:05 AM

That is what I was thinking, I would never need to boot into windows or linux. I would just boot off the cd-rom then just select the partition on the sender and the reciever is just going to use hda0 every time. Like I said I am going to try it here real soon and I will let you know.

Thanks,
Kevin