[ale] Ghosting software

[Patrick Jones]

Having Ghosted a couple of hundred NT machines - from GIM
of course :) and 4 Novell servers, I will throw my pitiful $0.02 in.
Of the NT machines, the main problem I had was when GIM
switched the video card on me.  It didn't cause a big problem
but now I have 3 different images for the 3 types of video cards.
(You should have seen it when we had a couple different HD sizes
and NICs)  I also have about 4 different types of CD-Roms - not
including the different speeds.  I had a few give me the BSOD
but that was more likely defective hardware/memory than
anything else.  The BSODs weren't right away, it took them a
few months.  On the Novell servers, we went from Compaqs
to Compaqs so everything went very well, except that Norton
Ghost crapped out a couple of times due to the large volume
of files.  We ended up having to do volume by volume.
The one thing I liked about Ghost for Netware was the ability
to resize partitions.

Patrick Jones
Lurker by Design

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Jeff Hubbs [SMTP:Jhubbs at niit.com]
> Sent:	Wednesday, August 09, 2000 1:56 PM
> To:	Carl Forsell; Nassar Carnegie; ale at ale.org
> Subject:	RE: [ale] Ghosting software
> 
> I'll also take the opportunity to throw in my standard Ghost admonition:
> 
> IMHO, you're playing with fire whenever you take a Ghost image from one
> machine and implant it into another, regardless of OS and regardless of
> how
> "identical" you think the target machine is to the source machine.  I
> would
> surmise that the risk is less with Win95/98 than it would be with NT or
> Linux, but if the target machines start acting weird every once in a while
> -
> i.e., locking up, oopsing, or giving you the ever-helpful "Aiee,..." (I
> love
> that one!) it could be because a minor difference in rev level within
> chipset, etc. existed that might have otherwise made the running kernel,
> driver, module, etc. do something a little differently.  One could
> mitigate
> this a bit by recompiling kernel and modules post-Ghost, I'd imagine.
> 
> When I was researching the use of Ghost for NT across a set of supposedly
> identical desktops, one thing I noticed was that a couple of them had
> different CD-ROM drives from the rest.  I thought that this would be a
> difference that probably wouldn't amount too much, but it made me wonder
> what less-obvious differences might exist that could really cause a
> problem
> that would be nearly impossible to actually attribute to one specific
> thing?
> 
> Having said that, do any of you think I'm being paranoid about this?  I'm
> open to flames.
> 
> - Jeff
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Carl Forsell [mailto:cforsell at roman.net]
> > Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2000 1:25 PM
> > To: Nassar Carnegie; ale at ale.org
> > Subject: Re: [ale] Ghosting software
> > 
> > 
> > I recently used Norton Ghost 5.1D (personal edition) to ghost 
> > a couple of
> > SuSE machines.  Price was about $60.00 or so.
> > If you look back at the ALE archives about a week ago, we had 
> > a dsicussion
> > concerning alternatives...
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Nassar Carnegie <nassar at linuxgeneralstore.com>
> > To: ale at ale.org <ale at ale.org>
> > Date: Wednesday, August 09, 2000 1:10 PM
> > Subject: [ale] Ghosting software
> > 
> > 
> > >Does anyone know of any ghosting software for Linux/FreeBSD?
> > >
> > >--
> > >-----
> > >Nassar Carnegie
> > >nassar at linuxgeneralstore.com
> > >Linux General Store
> > >--
> > >To unsubscribe: mail majordomo at ale.org with "unsubscribe 
> > ale" in message
> > body.
> > >
> > 
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