TQ# 4 - Cloning 500 laptops

Imaging or cloning (what I basically understand as the same thing) software and settings on computers is something that any Tech Director is going to have to learn to do eventually. Personally, I have been involved in the creation and execution of an image disc to roll out desktop computers in a corporate environment. A “coreload”—a standard set of applications (including the OS) that are licensed for as many machines as are going to be used— is defined and then other standard settings, such as operating system configuration settings (policy settings, registry restrictions, screensaver timeout settings, proxy addressees, etc.), printer setups, and OS network accounts and domain joinings are all isolated and then made part of the company’s or school’s “image.” This image is then run on every computer in a, mostly, automated (there is a need to hit a key only one time in our system) process, beginning from various media. We get our machines from Dell and they have the OS on them in an initial install state. We do not use this install; rather, our image starts fresh, formatting the hard drive, installing the licensed OS that we get from Dell and then installing the CL apps. Four reboots are required in our scenario and the process must not be interrupted (or it has to be started all over again). The complete transfer of the image will usually take 3.5 hours per machine.

For these projects I have used Norton Ghost and the image was at one time burned to a CD, but today usually run from a network drive. The network is fast enough at my company so that the 3.5-hour reference point is usually reached. When other applications are requested/purchased by the end user, however, the process can take up to 4.5 hours. Usually, these other apps are installed manually (i.e., not using the automated process of Ghost). Serial numbers or license keys are inserted in the software as the image is run on the machines.

The scenario I wish to envision here will be an installation of Linux (perhaps chosen due to lower cost for the school, but something with which I am mostly unfamiliar) on the 500 laptops. No matter how you look at it, this will take some time and there needs to be significant planning beforehand, if at all possible. For one thing, I have found in my research that Norton Ghost does not work very well with Linux (we assume here Ubuntu/Debian). Through research, I have discovered something called Systemimager, which I have never used before, but am hearing more and more good about it as I read. It is made by Soundforge, and appears to be open source (Soundforge’s website has been offline for some days now, so one, unfortunately, cannot check). It sounds powerful and likes all flavors of Linux. I have also researched what most would probably say is the gold standard of imaging software--Acronis True Image. There are definitely some bells and whistles here that Systemimager is lacking—for example, Acronis can go back to a previous image in the event that a patch causes problems and it can do this without reinstalling the entire image. For Acronis, you will be paying a hefty price to use it: there appears to be licensing dependent on how many machines you will image with it. Educational institutions receive special pricing, but nonetheless it is going to cost in the neighborhood of thousands of dollars compared to the open source Systemimager. Acronis will work with Linux fine, according to their website (http://www.acronis.com/industry/education/ ). If one goes with Acronis, the purchase of this software will have to be made sometime before the 500 laptops show up. The decision whether to purchase Acronis or some software with extra bells and whistles will involve a consideration of what other significant things the software can do for you down the road—for example, deploying patches and upgrades to software across your network. This will be a key decision, but generally I would probably go with something with a greater feature set.

Another tradeoff in doing images, in general, involves the media by which we do our image, which in turn involves how fast our image will run. I have done imaging from CD’s and even flash drives, but this involves creating the master image on every one of those media so that multiple machines can be imaged simultaneously. For this reason, then, I do not think I would run an image today except from the network. However, depending on the speed of one’s network, it may be quite a bit slower doing it this way and, perhaps, not even feasible. One also has to take care that certain ports are opened when one has machines receiving an image across the network. The steps to setting up your imaging process for Systemimager (installing the software on both a server and a ‘golden machine’ and then running the commands to make it download to each machine attached to the network) are found here: http://www.howtoforge.com/howto_linux_systemimager The somewhat arcane command lines that have to be run can be learned by your typical Tech Director without too much trouble. Additional commands and a boot disk are required to allow the machines to connect to the network drives when the machines do not yet have bootable software on them. Thus, this is an extra step, where a bootable floppy (if it has one!) or CD first has to be made for each machine and then has to be inserted in each machine. I believe that a machine can start with the Dell image and then this can be overwritten by the image process once the machine connects to the network. If the flash drive or CD process is going to be used, the Tech Director will likely want to call for student volunteers to insert discs. What will be there motivation for helping out here? Perhaps experience itself can be the emphasis.