Paul Greidanus wrote:
> * - Ok, it's "possible" but it's hugely hackish.. i.e. you can use the 
> autoinstall script to dd out a disk image onto a raw partition, but it's 
> not likely to be very effective.  Or you could use something like ghost, 
> and image it that way, but again, hack.

The "raw partition copy" has never been the preferred approach in SystemImager
(for a lot of reasons), but it could be an interesting path to explore.

With raw partition copies (I've in mind something a little bit more structured
than an ugly hack) we could easily implement the support for many currently
unsupported OSes: Solaris, Windows, *BSD, ... we could always use a Linux
installing system (the well-tested BOEL kernel + initrd.img approach) to image
the clients with different OSes and write images using a simple "dd". And all
the currently available transports to download the images from the image server
could be used at zero-cost. For example the integration with the BitTorrent
transport would be really simple: actually BitTorrent supports only regular
files (and directories) and an image generated by a raw partition copy *is* a
regular file.

The problems come when we need to do something *inside* the image at the end of
the imaging process, for example the generation of a random SID for Windows
clients, the network configuration, etc. Moreover there is the heterogeneity
problem: the "raw copy" approach probably will not work with clients that have a
different hardware.

Well, just some thoughts for the future...

-Andrea

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