A Very quick and easy way to setup Dozens of PCs or nodes...

[Felix Rauch]

On Wed, 16 Jun 1999, Christopher Snyder wrote:
> Ghost builds a compressed image of a Hard Drive, sector by sector,
> at very fast speeds.
> 
> The compression doesn't work for Unix / Linux though...this will
> slow you down a bit - maybe all of you guys and gals could e-mail
> Norton and ask them to work on the compression for Linux!!!
> [PLEASE!]

We do the same with a couple of shell-scripts (mostly "dd" and
"g[un]zip"). Currently we transfer the partition images over NFS, but
this is bad as the server becomes a bottleneck. Another program which
eliminates this has been used for benchmarking and will soon be
adapted for real use (it uses a so called "multidrop-chain" and works
fine for switched networks).

The nice part of this is that it works for any OS (we currently
"clone" Linux, Oberon and NT partitions this way). Linux works
perfectly right after cloning (we have a DHCP server which uses fixed
addresses and names depending on the ethernet MAC address), for NT we
still have to set some things by hand after cloning (scripts are on
the way).

The nice thing is that we can clone a 2 GB partition to a cluster of
15 machines in less then 4 minutes over Gigabit Ethernet.

We hope to have a page with a description of this procedure (and the
tools) in a few weeks.

- Felix
-- 
Felix Rauch                      | Email: rauch@inf.ethz.ch
Institute for Computer Systems   | Homepage: http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/~rauch/
ETH Zentrum / RZ H15             | Phone: ++41 1 632 7489
CH - 8092 Zuerich / Switzerland  | Fax:   ++41 1 632 1307