Hi Donald,
I have certainly given up on trying to find a multicast solution for this
week. I am preparing for the changes that will likely come right after
the school term starts in about 10 days. I can manage most of it using ARD
(Apple Remote Desktop) equivalent to NetOP for PCs but still want to be
able to do an image quickly if there was a need for it. For now I have a
student working in the lab switching firewire cables every hour to 8 new
machines so that's moving along slowly but is getting the job done.
I was thinking of doing exactly what you are suggested with a bootdisk but
going the long way around it. Yellow Dong Linux is one of the most
popular distributions for PPC Mac. This is my plan.
1. Install base system of Yellow Dog Linux with compiler tools on G5
2. Compile udpcast on G5 and on an exsiting Redhat Linux machine
3. Test run udpcast with these two machines
4. Make a NetBoot image of G5 machine with udpcast included (if possible)
and utilize Apple's NetBoot server component
5. NetBoot a few machines and start udpcast to receive on G5
This is my theory to put togther a working solution but we'll see how it
goes. One thing I am sure about is that developing a Linux based solution
is likely to be quicker than trying to port it to Apple's Darwin/FreeBSD.
I am going to look at "g4u" as well and may be that's even a faster
efficient solution for my needs. My image is already compressed at 21GB,
which extracts to about 29GB on disk. This image has about 15 pieces of
software including Adobe Premium CS and Final Cut Pro (I think) with all
the media files for editing movies and graphics. Unfortunately, it really
can't get any smaller than this.
I would certainly like to get hold of any scripts or tech notes that will
guide me to accomplish this task.
Sincerely appreciate any help you can provide.
Cheers!
--
Rishi R. Arora
LAN Administrator, Computing Services
University of Toronto at Mississauga
On Sat, 28 Aug 2004, Donald Teed wrote:
>
> I'd like to see a way that udpcast could help
> on the Mac. I don't know if it can be
> made to work outside of the x86 platform.
> Perhaps someone would have insights into how
> to make that work, but given the time line
> you have, it might be better to
> look at all options immediately.
>
> If I were faced with one week in which to make
> this work, I'd consider a solution like g4u
> ("Ghost for Unix"), but running on Linux.
> I assume there are bootable CDROMs of Linux
> or even Mac OS available that will bring up
> a *nix-like environment on the G5. If you add
> the scripts from the g4u (uploaddisk
> and slurpdisk) to such a bootable CDROM,
> it provides for cloning that is similar to
> udpcast except that it is operating over standard FTP transfers.
>
> This can probably handle a dozen or more simultaneous
> transfers. If you zero the unused portions of the
> master disk first, you can get the image down in
> size. In my case I have a 40 GB disk with dual
> boot of Windows XP and Xandros Linux on the
> master, and it gets down to a 3 GB image (same gzip
> in g4u style cloning or udpcast). When transferring
> something like that over FTP, the bottleneck is the
> client hard drive, and so it takes quite a number
> of FTP transfers before the network is saturated.
> If you have gigabit network and Gb ethernet
> devices in those G5s you might be able to clone
> a good number of machines simultaneously over
> the FTP based method.
>
> I'm a big fan of udpcast, and would highly recommend
> it for x86 cloning, but based on the little I know
> about the options on the Mac, I'd seek out a bootable
> CDROM and try to work with the scripts, which only
> require dd, gzip, and ftp.
>
> I'm not sure who makes a good live CD for the Mac - perhaps
> Gentoo? If you want to proceed this way, I have
> some scripts I've made work from Knoppix Linux
> for this purpose - I can email them to you.
>
> --Donald Teed
>
>
> On Fri, 27 Aug 2004, Rishi R. Arora wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I am interested in finding a solution to multicast a very large 21GB image
> > onto our new G5 machines. We have got quite a few to do so ASR via
> > Firewire is no longer an acceptable solution. Has anyone ever done this
> > before and been successful?
> >
> > Background
> > ----------
> >
> > I spoke with an Apple System Engineer in Canada and he has informed me
> > that Apple doesn't have a multicast solution in place yet. However, the
> > developers at Apple HQ have heard our cry all the way from here and may be
> > working on finding a solution possibly in the near future.
> >
> > Since I found this software last night I haven't had much time to play
> > with it and workout all the compilation errors (missing and incomplete
> > libraries for OSX). We have a Gb network for two brand new labs to be
> > setup and running in a week. So I am really trying to find a more robust
> > solution as the image may be modified during a term for repairs or a
> > complete overhaul. For now our plan B is to use Carbon Copy Cloner from
> >
http://www.bombich.com, which is working out to be the only stable
> > solution. Its a painfully slow process. One machine at a time.
> > Alternatively, we can NetBoot a few machines at a time and use ASR (Apple
> > Software Restore) but the disk isn't fast enough on our AFP shared drive
> > to distribute data to more than 4 clients at a time. This process takes
> > about 270-300 minutes to dump 21GB image on these clients since each
> > connection is a unicast.
> >
> > Any help and comments are appreciated.
> >
> > --
> > Rishi R. Arora
> > LAN Administrator
> > University of Toronto at Mississauga
> > _______________________________________________
> > Udpcast mailing list
> > Udpcast@udpcast.linux.lu
> >
http://udpcast.linux.lu/mailman/listinfo/udpcast
> >
> >
>
