Imaging
Filed Under (cool tools, deployment, imaging, linux) by Dave Mast on May-26-2007

I rarely (and I mean RARELY) come in on Fridays, but I decided to come in this Friday because there were some PCs that needed prepped for our interns by Tuesday.

We have a base package of software that gets installed on our PCs by default, and until now, it’s been somewhat of a pain, especially when I have to prep a PC that I don’t have an image built already for.

I don’t know what led me to do this, and I don’t know why I never thought of it sooner, but I found that if you run an installer from the command line and add a “/?” switch, there’s a real good chance you’ll see an option to run the installer in silent mode — basically this means no user interaction … SWEET!  Take that option, throw in some scripting, and you’ve got a VERY hassle-free way to install a good bit of software.  There are some rogue installers out there that don’t give you a silent install option, and so those are in a separate folder.  Once those are done, the script kicks in, installs the rest of the software, and also copies all the sysprep tools onto the new machine so that we can reseal it and get it ready for imaging.

There’s quite a few imaging tools out there.  I decided to use SystemRescueCD for what we’re doing.  SysRescCD is basically a live Gentoo Linux image that contains a nice array of tools for disk troubleshooting, partition resizing, and backup.  I simply boot the CD, make a samba connection to my imaging share, and run a script that packages the MBR, the partition table, and all of the partitions up, compresses them, and uploads them to the share.  A separate script will download the image you select, and apply it to any blank harddrive. 

If you’ve got a decent knowledge of Linux (my Linux skills are nothing to brag on), download the ISO and give SysRescCD a try.  If you want the upload and download scripts to make life easy, give me a shout and I’ll pass them along.

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Comments
shellie on May 29th, 2007 at 7:05 pm #

We recently started using DRBL/Clonezilla at work. I can’t wait to try it out at church. It works a lot like Ghost. It only takes about 5 minutes to create each image and about 3 minutes to download it to a machine. It also does multicasting which is really helpful. It was a bit of a challenge to set up the multicasting, but the single machine imaging worked right out of the box. I’ve never used PXE before, but I’m really liking it for imaging.

Dave Mast on May 29th, 2007 at 8:19 pm #

I started reading up on DRBL and Clonezilla after you posted this, Shellie, and it really looks cool. If I get a box freed up I may install Ubuntu and give it a try.

Thanks for telling me about this!

Shellie on May 30th, 2007 at 8:02 am #

I set it up on its own Ubuntu box too. I keep the multicast network separate from our main network though. We didn’t really want to broadcast more traffic across our already polluted network. It would be nice to reimage an entire training room at once, but we decided that it wasn’t that necessary.

We buy all our PC’s for the next year in bulk at the end of every year so I casually image 6-10 as I need them. It’s so much faster now with DRBL. I can image them all from start to finish in about 15 minutes.

Before DRBL we were using G4U and G4L. I could only do 4 machines at once and it took about 20 minutes per machine to image. It took nearly an hour just to make the images! We have a lot of laptops and tablets in production, and they take even longer to copy/image because of the slower speeds. I’m more than excited about the DRBL find.

Also, G4U and G4L images also required a lot more prep work to keep the image files under 2 gigs. The size of the image files isn’t an issue with DRBL.

When you’re playing with it I’ll share anything I can to help if you need it.

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