[LUAU] Open Source Ghosting

[whenever]

On Tuesday 24 August 2004 10:19 am, MonMotha wrote:

> 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.
dd can't resize partition, ghost and DI(disk image) can, if you have a smaller 
or larger drive so you can resize it while restoring the image.
>
> 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
it's the SID, using SID to generate RID for user account.
> 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
Ghost don't just change it, you need to run ghost walk after the restore to 
get a new SID. You don't have to use ghost to do that, any thing that can 
image a system will be good enough,  first you need to run sysprep(free 
download from M$) before creating the master image, it will generate a new 
SID and go through a mini install just like when you buy a preloaded windows 
system, there are options that you can use, like scripting the hostname and 
ip address, dns and etc, use pnp option to detect new hardware if the image 
is not from the same hardware. SID is not for per-seat licensing, but it will 
cause problem on AD if they are the same, they think they are the same 
computer.
> 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?
images on windows and using AD install server can use PXE boot to remote 
install on all clients without any user interaction with the condition of 
script out all basic setup, "imaging linux system is easy" not really a true 
statement. 

there are OSS utilities that can do ftp and http install of system image for 
Windows and *nix, but still can't re-partition during restore. So, OSS 
utilities can do the same except resizing the partition on the fly.
>
> --MonMotha
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