Comments on: Episode 74 - Ben’s Band-Aid

by: Claudio

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 13:56:51 +0000

Hey guys. I enjoyed the section where you talked about use of open source utilities for imaging PCs. I’ve used G4U in the past when nothing else was around. It uses NetBSD instead of Linux and it pretty much worked with everything, but the only problem is that it would image the ENTIRE drive, including empty space (although you could reduce the size of the image with nullfile.exe or some other fashion that would write zeros to the empty space). Fortunately, it seems that there have been some more open source solutions appearing since then with improved features like those in their commercial counterparts, making them more viable than ever.

Frankly, I’ve wondered myself why companies like Symantec don’t use open source OSes for their cloning solutions. I can understand why they wouldn’t use GNU/Linux because of possible issues with the GPL, but they could easily use any of the open source BSD variants (as mentioned, G4U used NetBSD). From what I’ve understood, BSD licensing seems to be more approachable for some corporations, hence this would be a great alternative for them. I would love to see GSS using a Unix variant that would be compatible with all currently available NICs out there than have it fumble around with NDIS drivers in DOS.

Thanks again for the podcast. Good to have you all back.

by: Slim Backwater

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 01:53:51 +0000

Just a thought on the VPN issue. Not only do you need port 1723 of the TCP protocol enabled, you also need the GRE protocol (Protocol 47) enabled.

If GRE is blocked, you won’t be able to establish that kind of a VPN connection, and should look into a SSH or SSL (a la OpenVPN) style of VPN.

And I have one question for you, do any of you use a Storage Area Network? Can you comment on it? What type or what components are you using? How much storage does it have? What do you use it for and how do you like it? Does it have many problems? Has it ever gone down?

I’m looking at a Xyratex F5402E, which the vendor calls an Omega F5412, for a single server with 4g Fiber Channel to support a VMWare Infrastructure deployment. I realize that a single server and one SAN device doesn’t make much of a network, but I’m just trying to get into this market, purchasing what we can afford, and get the data storage off the servers.

I love hearing about the big stuff, the dual quad servers, VMWare with 4 production servers on it and the like.

Thanks

._.

by: Cd-MaN

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 14:51:35 +0000

An other free tool for (un)archiving: http://www.izarc.org/

Keep up the good work guys.

by: Greg Padberg

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 03:48:22 +0000

I would also like to mention props to DRBL LiveCD w. CloneZilla, we were under-staffed and our summer re-imaging plans were a bit too optomistic (rural school division). The combo of DRBL + NewSid pretty much saved our bacon for several schools and about 4 different models of computers (not sure why it didn’t work on the Acer 5600 though).

Prepare a machine with 2 network cards and a hard disk (data drive formatted as ext3 works well), then boot it from the DRBL / Clonezilla server live CD.

Become root:
sudo su –
If you want to use pxeboot Clonezilla, in server, you need a place to mount it as /home/partimage:
mount -t auto /dev/hdc1 /home/partimag

(pause the DHCP server so that the PXE clients can boot from the DRBL server rather than the LAN DHCP server).

To start, DRBL service, run:
/opt/drbl/sbin/drbl-live.sh start

You can use /opt/drbl/sbin/dcs to start clonezilla, then boot the client via PXE to save or restore.