INaccess

Exploring computing in Indiana classrooms. How can we best use technology dollars to promote achievement?

Monday, September 26, 2005

Imaging programs

Do you need to image disk drives? Some of you may find this helpful. Thanks to Don Vosburg for this information.


Donald Vosburg wrote:
There are a number of imaging options, and I will explain with some pros
and cons:

1. g4l (http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l) - free imaging software that allows you to use a ftp for network storage of the image.  Can handle all Linux files systems, flexible in restoration process as well.  This is the IDOE-preferred method.

Negative:  slow, unicast-only

2. partimage (partimage.org) - free one-at-a-time partition backup, handles all Linux file systems, fast

Negative:  complicated restoration process, limited to same-size partitions

3. clonezilla - (clonezilla.sf.net) - free imaging system that is part of drbl.org server, scripting wrapper around partimage and other processes to create an imaging environment including PXE boot and multicast; very fast, supports all Linux file systems

Negative:  Setup requires a Fedora Core server (recommend FC3), setup is a little complicated

4. ghost (http://symantec.com/ghost/)  Ghost is a comprehensive imaging environment that supports a wide variety of setups, full-featured, supported

Negative:  Costs money, requires version 7.5 and above to support Linux ext3 filesystem, 8.0 or higher for reiserfs (NLD default)

5. Novell Zen Imaging 7
(http://www.novell.com/products/zenworks/overview.html#lm) - Part of Novell  Zenworks Linux Management, fast, supports all file systems, PXE boot, multicast, infrastructure for IDOE application management

Negative:  Takes time to set up, subscription based

posted by Mike Huffman @ 9:53 PM  

1 Comments:

  • At 1:13 PM, Blogger Alex Inman said…

    As a school, we have the affordable Novell School License Agreement, so we used ZenWorks for Linux. We found we needed to change the default id for disks to device ID in our donor image. We also use a script to remove the networking config files so new files with the correct mac address are created at boot. Those were the buggy parts.

    However, we used some simple bash scripting to have each machine identify itself in our inventory db, name itself, join to the appropriate AD groups and ZLM channels. It saved us days in imaging!

     

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