[ale] Finding desktops, laptops and hardware in Atlanat

[James P. Kinney III]

On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 09:23 -0500, Geoffrey wrote:

> > While it could be viewed (and is) as wasted drive space, it is also a
> > real butt-saver for the clueless windows crowd. Their system gets borked
> > and they can repair it by rebooting to the hidden partition and doing an
> > overlay installation. Yes, hard drives can fail and they can loose the
> > entire thing. But if it's a system under warranty from, say Dell, they
> > can send you a new hard drive ready to go with the hidden partition.
> 
> I can't believe you would defend this as a support issue.  Certainly 
> even clueless users know how to 'insert the cdrom that says "restore 
> disk".'  I would think that would be easier then telling them how to 
> boot to a different partition.

You would not believe the number of people that can't turn up that
restore cd collection when the system punts. I'll grant that the main
reason for Dell and the like doing it is so they don't have to provide a
CD and thus incur the cost of doing so.
> 
> > Realistically, a clueless newbie with an 80G drive is a dangerous thing!
> 
> A clueless newbie with a computer is a dangerous thing..

No Kidding!!

> > On some systems that I have built, I have created a linux partition with
> > the ability to store a dd copy of the main winbloze application
> > partition. That wastes loads of space but give me the ability to "roll
> > back" and entire system when the box gets hosed by a bad app/bug/moron
> > on the keyboard.
> 
> dd > /dev/cdrom...

Needs to roll first through mkisofs and then gets written to CD. This is
an OK process until they have 1G of application files. Yes, it could be
written to a DVD. I prefer the remote restore aspect of a live linux
setup. They bork the box and call me. I tell how to boot to the linux
mode. The linux mode then "calls home" to tell me where it is (IP
address) so I can ssh in and start the restore. I would _love_ to be
able to apply M$ update patches to my emergency partition instead of the
live partition. Then I could use the newer, better working NTFS tools
and rsync to push an update from a known-clean installation to the
probably dirty live system files.
> 
> > g4l would be a better way but it still needs better windows tools to
> > actually defrag the drive and create one contiguous chunk of used blocks
> > and then write NULL to the rest of the drive so it can get compress away
> > to nothing.
> 
> g4l???

It's "Ghost for Linux". 

But nothing beats "Assimilator" for the Mac. That was a truly fantastic
application. I've been banging around a pre-alpha pile of code rot I
started for Linux around RedHat 6.1. The ultimate plan was to have a
Linux based server tool that stored a single copy of the Windows
drivespace that was common to all win systems of that class (w2k, XP,
etc) and then a "database of deviances" (blatantly swiped conceptually
from Assimilator) that had the list and location and files for what was
different (i.e. network setting for static IP's, machine name, etc.).
Couple that with a Samba file server for user files then just update 1
clean system for each class, update the image and run the tool to push
it to all the others. It's basically rsync for windows.

This would make provisioning a new system nothing more than booting from
a floppy/CD, run the tool to do the raw write (go to lunch), then do the
register process and rerun to make the database entry for the
registration key.
> 
-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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