Using Linux to Cut-Down on Tech Support Costs?

alank asks: "I am investigating a network upgrade for a school. The core Servers are Linux based, but most workstations are currently Macs or PC's and the plan is to move these over to Linux at some later date. Currently the issues on managing large numbers of WinXX programs means that considerable tech support time is wasted on fixing them. I remembered the kiosk article where someone mentioned using Assimilator for the Macintosh to keep images of the hard disks on the servers so it could be replaced, I could not find anything comprehensive on the Windows side to do the same. Should I be looking at dual booting, and somehow using linux on the clients to re-image the drives? How would you do this?

Check out RevRDist

[gavinhall]

Posted by Ian K. Erickson:

For two labs of Macs, I used revRDist, a mac port of rdist by souls at Purdue. It runs as a client on the mac, pulling files off an AppleTalk share by a rule-driven file of directives.

This beats tricks like ghost & dd hands-down because no matter how similar your machines are they aren't EXACTLY the same in all ways.

For example, we tried ghost with Wintel clients in our lab and found reghosting invalidated the settings for the Ethernet card, causing the driver to prompt for configuration and network identity info when you booted up...

I'd make a linux boot-floppy that mounts an NFS share, prompts for a configuration out of a list (you could preset different floppies to autoselect certain configurations), and the run the corresponding script which:
mounts an NFS share, dd's a certain disk image on to the client hard disk, mounts the client hard disk and runs a script to modify or copy over certain files based on some rules, maybe run a few linux commands on it. You could even forgo floppies and put this stuff on the first disk partition, using a boot loader, making machines that can reconfigure themselves on startup.

The "why bother" is because some admin above you is going to screw up and make you cover for their stupidity. You'll get even machine in the lab identical & stable, and they'll buy ONE liscence for Photoshop 8.whatever. Now all your clients have photoshop x.x except ONE, and you'll want a system that can handle these exceptions. RevRDist was extremely good at handling just this sort of crap, so go read the documentation (even though it's a mac app) and inspire yourself.

ANAT.

[MeAtHereDotCom]

Apple Network Administrator Toolkit is godlike. If you aren't using it with your Mac's, you are insane. It allows to do things like re-imaging of hard drives. You can copy one hard drive to 10 in about 20 minutes.
I currently administrate a small network with around 75 MacOS machines on it. Almost all of them are running At Ease (the workstation security portion of At Ease), and I rarely have to visit them, unless something silly has happened like the Monitor has become unplugged, or it has been unplugged from the network.
I don't know what level of school you are currently working with,but I work in a K-5 environment, and have previously worked in K-12 environments. If you only use the computers for Word Processing and Internet use, Linux would be a good choice. However, most schools do stuff beyond Word Processing and Internet access. AFAIK, Hyper Studio does not exsist for the Linux platform. And Hyper Studio is one kick-ass piece of software for either Win95 or MacOS. Grades 2-12 will be able to use it, and I even think it's a cool program. Basically, you would not have access to some excellent software availible. But, it depends on your needs...

Anyways.

FOO.

No, No, Use TAR!

[zilym]

You guys are doing it too hard. Here's what you do... Install Linux on all of your machines using a little less than half of the upper part of the drive. Then install Windows just the way you want it on one machine. Boot back into Linux and create a tarball of the entire Windows partition. Ftp this tarball to all of your Linux machines, untar, and go.

The part about this is if a student deletes some OS files in Windows, you just boot into Linux, login root, and untar your Windows tarball back out and you are up and running again in less than 15 minutes (10 of which are unattended minutes).

A Quick off-the-cuff idea

[A nonymous Coward]

Disclaimers: I don't know what I'm talking about, I haven't done it, I don't know enough about windows to know how it would react.

OK. Install Windows, get it virgin like you want the students to see it.

Set up a second partition with a bare bones Linux partition.

Set up LILO to boot the Linux partition.

Now, from the Linux partition, DD the Windows partition to a Linux file.

And then set up boot so it goes to Linux, which DDs the (big-ass :-) file back to the Windows partitions, and then --


--- magic happens here ---


-- reboots into Windows mode.

I don't know exactly how you'd do that last reboot into Windows mode.

But DD is your friend if you want to restore the Windows partition to a known state.

--

PartitionMagic

[TilJ]

It's a non-Linux solution, but today's HD's are
larger than are needed for Win9x ... so why not
make two partitions, with only 1 bootable/viewable
at any given time ... if you need to Re-Virginize
(tm) it, just use PartitionMagic to copy one
partition ("substitute virgin") over the bad/
corrupted/messed up partition. Relatively
painless, and it it doesn't put a load on your
network.

Use Etherboot?

[JMarsden]

The tutorial on Etherboot at

http://www.linuxfocus .org/English/September1998/article2.html [linuxfocus.org]

suggests that others have already solved this. You might want to email the author of that tutorial for details?

Jonathan

Re-imaging HDs? Check out Ghost!

[Colitis]

Ghost has been bought by Symantec and is a commercial product now, but you should be able to find older versions around. It can make images of partitions or entire HDs, can use image files or go disk-to-disk, compress as it goes, and can re-size partitions using filesystems it knows about (FAT*, NTFS). Worth its weight in gold to us at work.

Re-imaging HDs? Check out Ghost!

[boethius]

After investigating numerous disk imaging "solutions" (at least 4) the only one that came out a winner was Drive Image or Drive Image Pro from Powerquest. Ghost was consistently *very* buggy in any demo version I used. DI Pro is also a whole lot less expensive than Ghost is and supports all the same features.