PC Cloning Solution?

pbaumgar asks: "Like many here on Slashdot, I'm a Systems Administrator. I have become responsible for maintaining about 300 laptops that I need to rebuild on a regular basis. I am looking for a solution to image them. I've been looking at Symantec's Ghost Solution Suite and am not too gung-ho on spending all that money for licensing. Can anyone recommend an better solution that would be cheaper?"

Re:What about RIS?

[obeythefist]

I've worked in large scale corporate environments (400+ workstations) configured for RIS and there's no equivalent. You can dynamically add/change/update images. You can roll in patches for the heck of it in a matter of moments. You never need to worry about where your install media is, you just press F12 and you have a new SOE image on the workstation. You never have to burn off new copies of your install media because it's all live. The admin who set up RIS also set up a diagnostic boot using the RIS network boot that loaded disk recovery tools and so on from the RIS server. The cost of RIS is included with the Windows server license (so yes, beer free) and the ongoing costs will be lower as your updates will cost you less in terms of build media and so on.

Re:Simple DD

[rpresser]

Whyinhell would you use a block size of 515? Not only is it too small, it is neither a divisor nor a multiplier the sector size -- guaranteeing inefficient reblocking.

Maybe IHBT.

Re:G4U

[jshare]

But we can freely recommend unattended installs ( see unattended.sourceforge.net ) that *do* use linux, and arcane unix commands! (Well, ok, perhaps no arcane commands. Linux though.)

Unattended is really nice for varying hardware. I used unattended in our lab at work, where we started out with quite a few different kinds of machines (imaging would have been nearly useless).

It uses dosemu to run the win32 installer under linux (and then there are a few reboots for the windows installer). It is sweet to watch the win32 installer running via the serial console.

http://unattended.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

There, I've linked it for you.

Agree 100%

[Shawn is an Asshole]

If you're even considering imaging, please don't. Try unattended [sf.net]. It may take a week or two and a few dozen trial installs but once you get the hang of it you will never want to go back to imaging.

Look at it this way. With unattended, you can assign different profiles to different computers, and they can inherit from each other. Say one group needs x apps, another group needs y apps, and another groops needs x y and z. With unattented that can all be maintained with three very small batch scripts. With imaging you would need to create three large images, and maintain each of them. With unattended, you maintain the master packages and all of your configurations make use of it.

Hardware detection is also easy. When I dealed with cloning I ended up having to keep multiple copies of the same image but configured for each different hardware. With unattended, you extract all the drivers into the $oem$/$1 directory and each computer's hardware is automatically detected and configured during the install. I can easly add any new hardware I want with no additional maintence.

If you need to apply different policies (without AD) learn how to use secedit. It's easy to write secedit and regedit scripts for unattended that will apply all configuration and policies automatically. Microsoft's Windows XP Security Guide [microsoft.com] covers this well.

Try unattended. You will not regret it.

Also, just as a comment to the above post, it's not neccessary that the NICs support PXE. Etherboot [etherboot.org] solves that. Etherboot gives a small (15k) image that can be put on a floppy, cdrom, lilo/grub, etc and will boot to PXE. It's not neccessary for the NIC to support it.