On Tue, Jan 18, 2000 at 11:43:17AM +0100, Onno Ebbinge wrote:
> I'm a sysadmin and have two Debian GNU/Linux potato servers and 50
> windows 95 workstations under my care.
>
> My problem is with the 50 workstations:
>
> (the 50 workstations have the same hardware)
>
> I want to install ONE workstation and then mirror the hard disk to
> all other workstations.
>
> The first time I did it was with ghost and I hooked up the installed
> hard disk to every client and mirrored it... Not a nice job to do
> and there must be a better way do do it! I know that ghost CAN use
> NETBIOS connections and such but I don't know how to boot it from a
> 1.44" flop and then use ghost.
>
> My question:
>
> I want to boot the workstation to be installed from a floppy with
> Linux or DOS. Then I want to make a connection to my server (or the
> installed workstation) and mirror the hard disk from a file (or
> hard disk).
>
> Frankly I don't care what is used or how it's being done (Linux/DOS
> with dd/ghost or something else!) but I don't want to hook-up all 50
> workstations again...
>
> Thanks for any ideas,
>
> Onno
>
I'm doing the same with a 486 server and a bunch of 386 workstations, all
IBM stuff with MCA buses, over a token-ring network, with small (~70MB-~200MB)
SCSI drives. Basically, I made a boot disk that mounts a NFS filesystem
over the network and chroots to it. That image mounts another NFS
filesystem with all the Win95 stuff on it. Everything pretty much works,
except the bootblock stuff (which I should get working tomorrow), and I
have yet to add the small random-number generator that will assign a
unique SMB computer name to the computer in a registry file that will be
imported on first bootup.
This all needs to be on one disk, because we all know the windows
computers will periodically have to be scratched and reinstalled, and this
is a one-time job for me, so I need to make it as easy as possible for
those who will "maintain" it.
If all your hard drives are the same size, you could probably just
do a dd from, say, /dev/sda or /dev/hda to a file and back, and that would
copy all the partition tables and the like.
Anyway, if you need some specific help, by all means, e-mail me and I'll
see if I can help.
--
"If you continue running Windows, your system may become unstable."
-- Windows 95 BSOD
Dwayne C. Litzenberger - dlitz@cheerful.com
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