Hi udpcast list!
I work as an IT technician and certainly one of the most invaluable tools for my line of work has become the excellent open source cloning app Clonezilla. I have found it many times faster than ghost in creating images of NTFS partitions as well as being more reliable in many cases too. AND its FOSS so- very cool tool indeed!
Clonezilla has a server-side counterpart app called drbl (diskless remote boot Linux). drbl is still in beta but when its finished it aims to provide functionality similar to Ghost Server, as found in Ghost Solution Suite. drbl uses udpcast to do its broadcasting of images over a network and the easiest way for people to try out drbl is to download drbl-live from
http://free.nchc.org.tw/drbl-live/testing/
http://free.nchc.org.tw/drbl-live/unstable/
or
http://drbl.sourceforge.net/download/sourceforge/
I can't wait to be able to totally replace Ghost with clonezilla/drbl, but I'm unable to switch from ghost server to drbl for 2 reasons
1- drbl-live server setup script/ ncurses GUI currently presumes you have multicast capable hardware and doesn't offer a mode to utilise udpcasts -brdcast mode easily yet but the author says he'll think about adding this capability.
2- drbl-live also requires that you either enter a specific time to wait or number of clients that have to connect or both. In my experience with using ghost server to image many machines you will know how many machines you WANT to image but you don't know how many of them will actually be able to connect to the server due to hardware failures and also you don't know just how long it will take to get all the machines connected to the server. Hence, I want drbl-live's Clonezilla server setup script to be able to work just like gs in that after setting the network settings and selecting the image to be broadcast etc. I would just select 'Listen for clients' or whatever. Then I would have an indefinite amount of time to run around and TRY to get everything connected to the drbl server. As each client connects to the server, it would get registered on the drbl console. When I've connected as many machines as possible, I would just be able to hit a key to start the broad/multicast. Setting a definite amount of time to wait or number of machines wouldn't work for me!
The author of clonezilla and drbl has told me that #2 isn't do-able because this isn't supported by udpcast. Is he mistaken?
Thanks for your help!
Dan