[LUAU] Open Source Ghosting

[MonMotha]

Nathan A. Keirn wrote:
> A few weeks ago at the Wednesday meeting we had a brief discussion about
> needing the enterprise edition of Norton's Ghost utility. I thought that
> there has to be a solution for this that is free. I stumbled across this
> link with almost no searching, but I know it is not exactly what we are
> looking for, but here is the link http://www.redhat.com/advice/tips/. Now
> why can't we write a shell script that copy's a windows hard drive image
> stored on a server to the requesting computer when it pxe boot's? I am no
> programming expert, and I don't know how pxe requests work, but this should
> be relatively easy, free, and honest! Anyone else interested?
> 
> Nathan
> 

Well, in principle, what ghost does is very easy to do with free utilities.  dd 
and netcat are all you really need.  I've even seen copies of netcat hacked up 
to support multicast, just like ghost does.  It's not too tough to image a 
system and all.

What Ghost does that is a bit more complex is the windows specific stuff.  NT 
puts some globally unique stuff on the system.  There's an AD serial number, the 
system CD key etc.  Ghost knows how to change all this to make sure that when it 
clones a system, the systems don't get confused when they're put on a network 
(and are all nice and legal if you have per-seat licensing).  Obviously, this 
stuff isn't needed with Linux: nothing HAS to be unique, and stuff that it 
"helps" to have unique (like the hostname) can be trivially changed (usually 
just by modifying a simple file in /etc, or even assigning it via DHCP if the 
system is configured to accept such a change).

In other words, imaging Linux systems: Easy.  Imaging Windows systems: Not so 
easy.  Surprise anyone?

--MonMotha