tar vs. ghost

[Tony Gettig <tony@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

First let me say that it was cool to see a discussion of Tom's Root Boot on
the list. I brought an old Acer 486/33 with 8 MB to a KLUG meeting 3 weeks
ago and we couldn't get Red Hat installed. By using the toms disk, I can
use that machine like a wanted to. I had actually started using it before
this thread came up, but it was cool to see my fumbling for a solution was
confirmed by others with the same tool. Cool!

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$!)

Tony

Tony Gettig, CNE
The Gettig Group, Inc.
http://www.gettig-group.com
Office: 616-321-7702
FAX: 616-321-7776
GBY!