I administer a few Microsoft Windows machines at work. We have recently
purchased Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition 8.0 for centralized disk image
administration. However, I failed to consider that Ghost requires a
DOS-compatible network card when performing remote imaging tasks and other
similar stuff.
To compensate for this, I thought it might be worth trying to modify Norton
Ghost's special boot partition, which is basically just an installation of
IBM PC-DOS on a seperate partition, bootstrapped with drivers and the Ghost
executable.
This boot partition could be modified to use some form of Linux -- probably a
customized distribution, or something based on existing boot disks depending on
complexity. This would allow me to use Dosemu in single user mode to run Ghost
Console Client under Dosemu, conveniently launched through some startup
scripts. I would use Dosnet to allow Ghost to access the network card through
Linux drivers. The cards in question do have Linux drivers which I have tried
and verified that they work using Knoppix.
In order for this to work, I have to be able to do the following:
1) The MAC address of seen by Ghost in DOS needs to be the same as the physical
MAC address, and outgoing packets need to have the MAC address of the physical
card. This is because the Ghost Console identifies computers via their MAC
address, and will probably freak out otherwise. I haven't looked closely into
Dosnet, but this should probably be doable. Any info on doing this specifically
would be helpful.
2) Ghost will probably need to be able just to access the hard drive directly --
without any form of file system redirection drivers or partition table
remapping or other forms of hacks. I don't need to be able to access the hard
drive from Linux itself -- I can happilly just make a system that does what I
want and load it as an initrd ramdisk. (Possibly also using loadlin or other
evil things.) I can't seem to find if this is possible in current versions in
the HOWTO, although I seem to have seen indications that this at least used to
be possible in earlier versions.
3) Ghost Console Client has to be runnable under Dosemu. While this setup will
probably be wildly unsupported from Symantec's end, and I haven't seen anybody
else on the Internet doing this, I'll be in uncharted terrirory, but I won't
really be able to test this until I solve problems 1 and 2. I'm not really an
expert programmer when it comes to the sort of code Dosemu is made of, but I
might be able to iron out a few wrinkles and hack a few patches if it proves to
be necessary.
I'd like to hear some opinions on my chances of pulling something like this off.
Also, some pointers on my questions above would also be immensely helpful.
I'd also like to know if any of the components, specifically Dosnet and direct
hard disk access is known to be particularilly flaky. Potential data loss is
not an issue, since image files will be backed up to a safe location and all
important data is stored remotely on a Samba server running FreeBSD anyway.
Finally, although offtopic, if anybody has any alternate suggestions for solving
my problem, I'd appreciate to receive some of those as well, as long as those
replies are kept off-list in order to keep the mailing list on topic.
Thanks in advance!
Per von Zweigbergk [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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