Hi, my name is Simón A. Ruiz, and I'm the Technology Assistant at Bloomington High School North. I'm the guy in the trenches for our implementation of the Indiana ACCESS (1:1 computing classrooms) program, and we're using Ubuntu as our flavor of choice for which OS we drop into the classrooms. I blog about all this at http://indianalinux.blogspot.com
I am the sum total of all the technical support this program gets at our school; I'm supposed to manage almost 300 workstations on my own, in between doing the job that's in my job description. You might start to see my dilemma. We've been using Norton Ghost for all our imaging needs, and I had to come up with a pretty convoluted system to really be able to use it effectively to keep all the workstations updated (read all about it at my homepage http://www.mccsc.edu/~sruiz/5.10/imaging.htm). If you notice, I was already using your jargon (golden client) since I have been intending on moving to SystemImager since the beginning of this in the interest of removing proprietary software from our system altogether. Now we've come to a crucial point where I've either got to really devote a lot of time and energy into adapting the Ghost system to work for our new situation or dump Ghost altogether and move on to something better. I'm delving into SystemImager in order to figure out how it can help us achieve our goals, and I'm impressed with the list of stuff it's supposed to do. We need a solution to blow out images to the workstations that can do both full system restores (and initial image setup) and incremental updates. However, I am a newbie and can't seem to figure out how to get it all to Just Work(tm). I've managed to CREATE an image from a golden client, but I've yet to figure out how to RESTORE an image to another workstation. I've had a few errors I'll talk about below. I've got several questions I'd like to shoot off, so please humor me: 1) I want identical workstations, however since we have 2 (soon 3) hardware specs to work with (Dell 170Ls with IDE drives, Dell 210Ls with SATA drives, and soon some laptops), it seems like I'm going to have to maintain 3 separate images. My question regarding this is: is there a simple way to keep from having to maintain three separate golden clients for this? The vast majority of the image, is going to supposedly be identical between all the different hardware types, and I can't imagine that the parts that are different are all that dynamic... 2) In our network, we already have a DHCP server and have been functioning with dynamic IPs thus far. We have no control over the DHCP server and are not allowed to interfere with its normal functioning. Is it a requirement that we turn around and assign static IPs to the workstations now? Is there a simple way to work with hostnames instead? Not a huge issue, really, it'd just take communicating with the corporate people and letting them know we need this done, and then waiting for them to do it. 3) So, I used mkautoinstalldiskette to, well, make an autoinstall diskette. I could not set it to make the diskette at /dev/sda which is where our USB disk drive is, so I made an image file and DDed that to the diskette. This does not work, as the diskette (I think) assumes it's going to be /dev/fd0. The actual error message for this is "Checking for floppy diskette." followed by a reocurring "end_request: I/O error, dev 02:00 (floppy), sector 0. Am I basically screwed as far as using diskettes since all we have are USB disk drives? That would be rather annoying, especially considering the following: 4) Next I tried installing systemimager-client on the client to be re-imaged, and set it up to boot SystemImager from the hard disk. This does not work either. The error occurs because it tries to check the partitions and doesn't recognize the FAT12 partition (hda1 or hd0,0) that we have running in order to enable the use of GRUB 4 DOS which we need to boot to a diskette image in order to be able to Ghost a machine without running around with our silly little slow USB disk drives. Since it cannot recognize that partition (and in fact, I think it mangles it by overwriting the MBR on the hard disk so it likely can't recognize it because it destroyed it), it cannot read the partition table. Later on in the process I get the very evocative "FATAL: Couldn't mount hard drive!" error followed by some likely irrelevant stuff about how the kernel needs all necessary block and filesystem drivers. So...any ideas? am I going to have to Ghost an image onto the workstations, one that doesn't have a FAT12 partition in hda1, in order to be able to boot SystemImage from the harddisk? (The FAT12 partition is FreeDOS, and I had a hell of a headache getting it to work in the first place, I know that Linux doesn't quite like dealing with that partition) 5)I may have more questions, but for now I can't think of them, so I'll make this a statement: Thanks for providing an Open Source solution to this issue, it's only a small piece in the overall network management puzzle, but it's a key small piece. I hope this finds you all having a beautiful day! Simón ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Sisuite-users mailing list Sisuite-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sisuite-users
