RE: [tlug] System management software?

[patrick.niessen@example.com]

If you want to get quick results, you better pay money to get Symantec
Ghost.  This is possibly the best software ever invented for Desktop
Administrators.

Prepare one Image (all PCs will likely run the same hardware no?), and
multicast it every day to all machines.  Ghost will create a partition for
you, as well as providing a Windows Agent.  So from your Admin console you
can give a remote signal to the Agent, which will shut down the PCs and
restart them into the Ghost partition.  Ghost then starts listening, after
all PCs are connected the Server broadcasts the image out.  Installing
Windows takes about 20 minutes in total for all your PCs.

I've seen this being done manually using Red Hat / WinNT4, and then simply
copying all NT partition files, but it requires a lot of fiddling and you
need a FAT partition.  DD will most likely to a sector to sector copy so
takes really long ...

Patrick 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Larry Stanbery [mailto:lstanber@example.com] 
> Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2003 10:40 AM
> To: tlug@example.com
> Subject: [tlug] System management software?
> 
> 
> Well, after about two days of Google'ing for answers, hopefully I can 
> draw on the collective knowledge of you folks...
> 
> We're looking at *shudder* WinXP for a class lab environment (can't 
> convince the higher-ups that Linux gives us what we want -- they 
> believe it's just for servers and geeks).  I'm trying to find 
> some sort 
> of software that gives us the ability to lock those machines down so 
> that malicious activities get cleaned up after reboot.
> 
> I've searched on PXE boot, lab mangement software, windows, 
> linux, etc. 
>   I get pages and pages of garbage that doesn't help.  I've also 
> "dreamed up" a scenario wherein I'd use GRUB to boot a small 
> environment to simply do disk-mirroring ("dd") from a Linux partition 
> (invisible to Windows) onto the "main" partition (of course, I'd have 
> to write some software to do this, likely, or seriously tweak a Linux 
> environment to do it).  Another possibility is to do PXE boot 
> and serve 
> up an image from my Linux server to the client -- though I'd have to 
> figure out just how long that would take, etc., and how it would play 
> in a 20-seat lab with all of the machines firing at once (tried doing 
> Mac NetBoot using Linux server, but ran into trouble with the time it 
> took to download and with trying to fire numerous tftp sessions).
> 
> Many thanks for your thoughts.
> 
> - - - - - - - -
> Larry Stanbery, RHCE
> GPG Key ID: 2CEFA662
> 
>