[olug] Cheap ghost alternative...

[Nate M.]

On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 09:18 -0500, T. J. Brumfield wrote:
> I've used it. I found it a little confusing at first, but it really is a
> great program. You can even set up a server and push images to multiple
> boxes at once with it. It can also do compression of images, and unlike dd,
> it will just image the used portions of partitions if you want.
> 
> -- T. J.
> 


Clonezilla is, basically, a bunch of perl scripts that are a front-end
for Partimage, ntfsclone, and dd. 

It'll use partimage on fat and linux partitions, ntfsclone for ntfs file
systems, and dd for systems it does not know and for making a copy of
the master boot record.

For my own purposes I just use a bootable USB drive that I have
ntfsclone and partclone installed on. 

Basic operation goes like this... 

to clone:
1. use dd to make a copy of the first 512k or so of the master boot
record.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record

2. use partclone or ntfsclone to make a file system-aware copy of the
partition. (this way you only copy what you've used

And that's it. I'll use sshfs or samba to store it on a remote machine,
or nc for transferring stuff over the network and that sort of thing.


To restore:
1. use dd to write out master boot record to drive.
2. use 'sfdisk -R /dev/sda' (or whatever) to have the system re-read the
new partition tables.
3. use ntfsclone or partclone to restore the file system image to the
correct partition.


That's about all you need to do. It's not really any different then what
clonezilla will do for you. If you need to do more then one, then of
course, automation is good, but I'd be nervous running a full-blown
clonezilla server on a production network! It starts up to many insecure
services to be trusted. The clonezilla live cd is probably better,
though.

The magic that allows you to drop one download onto many many machines
simultaneously is 'Ethernet Multicasting'. For my personal uses I rarely
need that sort of thing, however.