[ale] Finding desktops, laptops and hardware in Atlanat

[Geoffrey]

James P. Kinney III wrote:
> 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.

Sure I would.  If you lose your keys to your car, you can't drive. 
Folks must remember to put the 'keys' somewhere where they can find them.

>>> 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.

Might as well put two drives in the box, but then you need something to 
keep them both in sync.

>>> 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.

Let me know when you get done with it. :)

-- 
Until later, Geoffrey