Re: tar vs. ghost

[Bruce Smith <bruce@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> And that got me thinking about this: I've used Norton Ghost before. It's a
> fairly decent product. If you're unfamiliar with it, it is a drive cloning
> software. It's great for rolling out multiple workstations with identical
> configurations. I think it has the lions share of the market for that type
> of software.
> 
> Is there a reason why I couldn't get the same result using tar? Setup the
> new workstation, tar the entire filesystem a network drive, and POOF! All I
> need to do for a new identical workstation (or the same one after a user
> hoses it!), is boot with something like toms, connect to the network hard
> drive, recreate the workstation filesystem/format it, and un-tar the image
> to it. One step further: take that image and burn it to a bootable CDROM
> that restores the system automagically. Hmmm...
> 
> Am I just hopping on the clue bus with this one? Why wouldn't it work? Why
> wouldn't I want to do this? I can see a conflict with SID's on NT boxes,
> but for Win9x or Linux, why not use this Linux driven "ghost" (tar)? What
> are others doing out there for this scenario? I apologize if this is an
> elementary type of question, but it can be challenging to think outside the
> box (Linux!) when a lot of your everyday work is confined to working with
> Windows. It makes me think that the biggest hurdle Linux has to overcome is
> changing the way people think about finding a solution. (i.e.-don't default
> to M$!)

Tar works great for coping Linux ext2 partitions.  
Not so good on windoze fat16/fat32 partitions as 
some attributes seem to get lost.

Be careful with tar's options.  

"p" is very important to preserve permissions.
Otherwise you get device files and tmp directories
without correct permissions, and all non-root users
have really weird problems.

"l"  (lowercase L) is also useful not to cross mount
points to other partitions when tar'ing the system.
Especially /proc !!!

--------------------------------------------
Bruce Smith                bruce@armintl.com
System Administrator / Network Administrator
Armstrong International, Inc.
Three Rivers, Michigan  49093  USA
http://www.armstrong-intl.com/
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