the time it takes to move a 3 GB image across a network is about the
same as the time it takes to make one over a network. imaging to
another local partition creates a self healing machine, though. it
would be cool to boot into that other partition and automagically
restore the main system partition :-)
the key to speed in making the images is low overhead in tftp. i still
wanna tinker with knoppix and ssh since 5 min vs 20 min is a trivial
difference in accounts with few PCs.
/jim
Tom Woods wrote:
Jim,
To be honest, I'm usually not patient enough to run ghost over the
network if I can avoid it. Generally I make a FAT32 partition and
ghost to that directly and then burn/copy/move the image as
necessary. When I have to image over the network, it's at the office
where we're running 100% Windows based file servers, so I haven't
tried ghosting to a samba box... Thanks, now I have another project
to do. :) I'll probably set up a samba server at home, one of these
days, and see if I can ghost to it.
I've used dd before, but it's been quite a while, and it was painfully
slow compared to ghost. I would think that it's improved
significantly in the past two or three years, since I used it last. I
also was a rank Linux beginner at that time, so I may have not been
set up real well. At that point in time I hadn't even heard of
Knoppix (did they even exist back then?) so I was kind of on my own to
get it working.
Take care,
Tom Woods
Jim Ray wrote:
yeah, samba puked hard for me on ghost images of any size. what kind
of production rate do you get with the compression algorithm
running? i usually do default 2 GB on winders and haven't tried the
smaller size on samba.
me thinks i'm gonna use jason's instructions on knoppix and dd next
go around. it would be cool to set up pxe boot to knoppix and not
have to use a cd or ghost.
Jim Ray, President
Neuse River Network, Inc.
tel: 919-838-1672 x111
toll free: 800-617-7652
cell: 919-606-1772
http://www.Neuse.Net
Ask about our Clean Technologies. Established in the Carolinas 1997.
Tom Woods wrote:
You may know this already, but you can (and I do) tell ghost to
split the image up into bite (not byte) sized files when you create
it. I typically break all of my ghost images into 690MB files just
in case, for some unknown reason, I need to burn it off to CDs (or a
DVD if the target system supports DVD). Having said that, I try to
keep my images as small as possible, so I've never made a 34GB image.
ghost -split 690 -auto -z9
That's what I use when I am going to create a ghost image. The
-auto makes it automatically change the file extention without
asking for filename confirmation. The -z9 forces the highest level
of file compression. If you've not been using -z9, and you're
making 34GB images, you may be pleasantly surprised in the end-result.
Hope this helps you. If not, maybe someone else will benefit.
Tom Woods
Tomm Lorenzin wrote:
SUBJECT: errmsg "The file protocol process died unexpectedly"
Hope this hermaphrodite/SaMBa-network issue saves someone some of the
head-scratching that I have been through for the past 24 hours.
I have been having a problem xferring a 34GB "Norton Ghost" image from
my personal-networked FC3 RAIDed backup server to my USB2 portable
Maxtor 200GB HD. In several tries, the process always fails in the
same
manner, i.e., the errmsg below shows up and a truncated 4GB file is
all
that is present on the Maxtor despite bow-koo free space.
BTW... the process also died in exactly the same manner when I
tried to
write the file to the Maxtor over the network while the portable was
connected to the FC3 system. This more-or-less exonerated linux. The
errmsg was just linux's voicing of the problem 'cuz that's where we
were
hooked up. I'll bet (but I haven't tried yet) that I'll get a
similar -
tho prolly more cryptic - errmsg from windoze xpee when I try to do
the
same when directly connected to the wxpee machine.
Paraphrased form the wwweb:
"VFAT has a file size limit of 4GB. That would explain the download or
file-transfer corrupting or quitting at 4GB. This would not happen if
the maxtor was formatted as an ext3 partition."
This explains why:
1. when Ghosting directly to the 200GB Maxtor from Windoze (as
ususal) -
and NOT to a separate NTFS partition, Ghost - unbidden - breaks the
ghost image into separate 4GB blocks - NOT so that they can be written
to DVDs as previously surmised, and
2, This is why xferring a large (>4GB) file to the Maxtor (VFat by
intersystem compatibility necessity) from FC3 fails when reaching 4GB
with the errmsg:
"The file protocol process died unexpectedly"
(NTFS - like ext3 - has no such 4GB filesize limit. There may be one,
but I don't know where (in filesize) it is, and I don't wanna know.
7;^D
--
TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug
TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/
TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
