[olug] Ghost and Linux servers

[Vincent.Raffensberger at dtn.com]

By that description, it sounds like g4u is just another dd.  BTW, you 
could use dd to copy the raw disk image and even compress it for storage. 
Nothing fancy there but it works the same.

Newer versions of Ghost handle ext2/3 perfectly.  I recently had to 
upgrade over 100 servers from RH6.2 to 8.0 and used ghost (and a little 
shell script on first boot) to do it all.  The disk image fit onto a 
bootable cdrom along with the ghost utilities. 
It went very smoothly.  I was especially impressed by the hardware raid 
controller support.

The new version of ghost will also create a bootable cd with most common 
drivers for your NIC, SCSI, IDE, RAID, CDROM, etc...




Phil Brutsche <phil at brutsche.us> 
Sent by: olug-bounces at olug.org
11/09/2003 05:21 PM
Please respond to
Omaha Linux User Group <olug at olug.org>


To
Omaha Linux User Group <olug at olug.org>
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Subject
Re: [olug] Ghost and Linux servers







K.J. Kirwan wrote:
> Would g4u (ghost 4 unix) help you? 

g4u copies the raw disk or partitions.  It'll work fine as long as the 
destination hard drive is the *same* size (and my same size I mean the 
same sector count) or larger as the source - not all drives of the same 
advertized capacity have the same sector count.  One 60GB drive can 
actually end up being a couple GB smaller than another 60GB drive from 
another manufacturer.

With Symantec's Ghost, a 40GB NTFS volume can be imaged onto a 2-3GB 
file if that's all the data that's on the partition.  That limits what 
file systems Ghost can image; it's generally limited to FAT, FAT32, 
NTFS, and *maybe* (that's a really strong maybe) HPFS.  PowerQuest 
DriveImage (aka PQDI, a similar program recently aquired by Symantec) 
can handle ext2/3 file systems as well.

The big problem with Ghost is that it's a Win32/DOS program.  You've not 
developed true dislike for MS-DOS until you've tried to make a bootable 
Ghost CD capable of pulling images off a Samba server (the network 
drivers and related utilities wouldn't fit in 640KB RAM with the CD-ROM 
drivers and utilities and still leave enough room for Ghost or PQDI to 
work).

If someone could teach g4u to understand at least the file systems with 
open-source implementations, many of us would be in hog eaven, so to 
speak.

And no, I'm not volunteering.

:)

-- 

Phil Brutsche
phil at brutsche.us


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