[ale] rsync, windows, netbooting, linux servers

[Jordi S. Bunster]

On Thu, Aug 15, 2002 at 09:11:43PM -0400, James P. Kinney III wrote:

> Has anyone seen anything even remotely like this? Sort of LTSP on
> massive steroids.

Well, back when I was in Brazil, one of the labs had a setup like this:

Each machine had, besides their normal hda 6gb hardrive, another one (hdc)
with 8gb (or 10gb), that had a mini-Linux distro, which would boot, and
would rsync (locally) a fresh install of windows from a folder in hdc to the
(student) corrupted one found on hda. Since students couldn't make many
changes before windows crashed anyway, and rsync was local, and those
were Pentium III's, it was not that slow to boot.

Sure is not the same thing you mention, but I just remembered it, and I
thought someone might find it as stupid as I found it. What a waste of
resources!

I have to agree though, it saved them a lot of time in maintaining the
Windows machines. LILO booted by default in Linux, and after Linux
repopulated the Windows partition, lilo was run with a switch that
changed the default image *only* for the next reboot, and then rebooted
the machine.

The lab maintainers also had another LILO image that, would do the
contrary. Would take the current status of the windows partition, and
write it to the "fresh" image they used to rsync. They used it to
install new software or make configuration changes permanent.

 -- Jsb




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