Options on re-imaging pc's remotely.

[jbritt1234]

I'm looking for some help coming up with a good way to re-image PC's remotely in our company.

Currently what we do is created master Images using Ghost, then re-image when needed if they are having a problem that will take more than an hour or so to fix. But, many of the PC's we support are in remote locations and it's a major pita to to go through that. Some site's don't even have servers where we can save the images in a central place and run ghost-cast on the Server.

So, one guy came up with a option of installing DOS and running Ghost on the C partition, the OS on the D, and then a hidden partition where the image files are kept. So, when a person boots up the PC, there is a blank "hidden" option in the boot loader that we can select, then Ghost will load and re-image the PC. We then just run them through the setup and they are on their way. We are not concerned at this time with backing up files on the remote PC's first. All apps and links they need are in the image. I don't care if they keep their vacation pics.

So, this method works, but I don't think it's very good. First off, the OS partition is D cause DOS has to be on C. You can redirect stuff to install to D, but I think things will slowly fill up on the C partition. Just does not seem like a secure method.

So, what I'm looking for is a way to maybe do something similar to this, but keep the OS on C using NTFS. Maybe a boot CD that does a similar thing.

I'm wondering if anybody has a better method in mind. Keep in mind that many sites do not have servers to hold image files. So, whatever they are accessing needs to be local. Using boot CD's would be a option, but we would like to keep it self-contained if possible.

Any help out there? tia

 

[DrGreen2007]

If its remote and theres no server for storage, then possibly you could just make an entire restore DVD (image, ghost and all) that just reimages the drive.

Even though theres no 'server' for storage, any chance of getting some workstation to use for storage?

 

[mechBgon]

With Vista Business, you could do a full system-image backup and store it on DVDs, or on a partition of the HDD, or a second HDD, or a high-capacity USB thumb drive. With WinXP Professional, one option would be an Automated System Recovery backup (a feature of the built-in Backup in XP Pro), but IIRC you'd need the motherboard & video drivers installed afterwards (you could pre-plant those on the desktop screen, however).

Bigger picture: if the users are messing the PCs up a lot by the usual stupid methods, then investigate whether it would be feasible to lock the computers down tight with a non-Admin user account and a disallowed-by-default Software Restriction Policy. I suppose I'm preaching to the choir here

Even though theres no 'server' for storage, any chance of getting some workstation to use for storage?

An external hard drive, even. :thumbsup:

 

[jbritt1234]

Originally posted by: DrGreen2007
If its remote and theres no server for storage, then possibly you could just make an entire restore DVD (image, ghost and all) that just reimages the drive.

This is possible, however we would prefer to keep it all on the machine if possible. That way the users would not have the ability to loose the DVD's. Additionally it could be a problem if a PC were stolen. Trade secrets etc. It's harder to get out of a building with a PC than a couple DVD's

Originally posted by: DrGreen2007
Even though theres no 'server' for storage, any chance of getting some workstation to use for storage?

unfortunately we are talking about a large number of sites. 50+ and growing. We have been talking about doing this with machines we phase out. But, we would like to get this new standard in all sites asap.

Thanks for the reply DrGreen!

 

[jbritt1234]

Originally posted by: mechBgon
With Vista Business, you could do a full system-image backup and store it on DVDs, or on a partition of the HDD, or a second HDD, or a high-capacity USB thumb drive. With WinXP Professional, one option would be an Automated System Recovery backup (a feature of the built-in Backup in XP Pro), but IIRC you'd need the motherboard & video drivers installed afterwards (you could pre-plant those on the desktop screen, however).

Bigger picture: if the users are messing the PCs up a lot by the usual stupid methods, then investigate whether it would be feasible to lock the computers down tight with a non-Admin user account and a disallowed-by-default Software Restriction Policy. I suppose I'm preaching to the choir here

Even though theres no 'server' for storage, any chance of getting some workstation to use for storage?

An external hard drive, even. :thumbsup:

Overall, our company is very slow to adopt new technologies. Vista will probably be a year away at least.

Currently probably 1/2 of our offices use XP and the rest 2000. Our company is BARELY in the mid sized range. We have to go though change control meetings for the smallest things. It's a very political situation. We are switching to a volume license situation but many of our contracts rely on what was purchased when the contract was last won. That could be as long as 5+ years ago. It's embarrassing to say, but we actually even still have a few Win98 machines around. (those are not involved with this topic however)

An external HDD or thumb drive could be an option, however we are trying to steer away from those because of the ease of theft. Not just the hardware, but more the data inside.

 

[jbritt1234]

Ideally the fix would be calling the re-imaging routine, which would be all self-contained on the local machine. Windows and other programs would still be on the C partition. Also, when the machine is re-imaged, the routine for re-imaging the machines must of course stay intact and not be broken somehow so that it can be run at any time.

Yes, a more limited account than the user currently has would help eliminate many of the problems we have. However due to programming limitations in many of the apps we use, that's most likely not going to change. Getting that to change at this point would probably be just as hard as winning the wpowerball. To many people involved, and too political. We just have to make the "standards" they put in place work.

Additionally, most of the people we work with in the offices are ANTI technology (read as older women). You run across those occasional issues that are hard to tie down to a positive hardware or OS problem. Easier re imaging of the PC's would help diagnose them.

 

[mechBgon]

Ahhh, politics... got it.

Maybe adding a cheap second internal IDE hard drive, and imaging the completed build to it with Acronis TrueImage or Ghost would be your best bet for the Win2000 and XP Home systems, and try out Automated System Recovery on XP Professional systems.

I had/have Acronis TrueImage 9.0 and it has its own bootloader, so your employee would see "Press F11 now if you want to to blah blah Restore blah" (I think it was F11) at each boot. If the image were stored on an internal HDD, it would be very fast, Windows will be activated, drivers and software ready. I have no experience with Ghost, so I don't know how this compares with Ghost.

With XP Pro, ASR would just require booting from a generic Windows XP CD-ROM, then hit F2 to initiate an ASR installation and go through the motions of installing WinXP. However, in the interest of standardization and simplicity, I suppose it would be better to use the same solution for everything.

 

[jbritt1234]

Originally posted by: mechBgon
Ahhh, politics... got it.

Maybe adding a cheap second internal IDE hard drive, and imaging the completed build to it with Acronis TrueImage or Ghost would be your best bet for the Win2000 and XP Home systems, and try out Automated System Recovery on XP Professional systems.

We are talking about literally thousands of machines. The purch req for those hard drives would be laughed at.

Just to clarify, no XP Home installs are out there. Thank god...

Originally posted by: mechBgon
I had/have Acronis TrueImage 9.0 and it has its own bootloader, so your employee would see "Press F11 now if you want to to blah blah Restore blah" (I think it was F11) at each boot. If the image were stored on an internal HDD, it would be very fast, Windows will be activated, drivers and software ready. I have no experience with Ghost, so I don't know how this compares with Ghost.

I have read a LOT of good stuff about Acronis. Maybe sometime in the future we could convince the powers to be to buy a site license for that. But that's a ways away and my department won't cut corners on licensing.

Originally posted by: mechBgon
With XP Pro, ASR would just require booting from a generic Windows XP CD-ROM, then hit F2 to initiate an ASR installation and go through the motions of installing WinXP. However, in the interest of standardization and simplicity, I suppose it would be better to use the same solution for everything.

This would kick off a STD windows install? Or can it call some type of Ghost or Acronis image? Unfortunately from state to state, even city to city we have HUNDREDS of varying images.

mechBgon, thanks for bouncing these questions off me, that's what I need at this point.

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: mechBgon
With XP Pro, ASR would just require booting from a generic Windows XP CD-ROM, then hit F2 to initiate an ASR installation and go through the motions of installing WinXP. However, in the interest of standardization and simplicity, I suppose it would be better to use the same solution for everything.

This would kick off a STD windows install? Or can it call some type of Ghost or Acronis image? Unfortunately from state to state, even city to city we have HUNDREDS of varying images.

It seems a lot like a regular Windows installation. You hit F2 at the first blue screen when it says Press F2 for Automated System Recovery. It remembers that, but goes along just like a regular Windows installation until finally it says "ok champ, where's that ASR file and the accompanying floppy diskette, now?" At that point, you supply it with the file location and the floppy (I think the floppy may be superfluous) and it goes to town. When it hits the desktop, you install drivers and I think you're all set.

I've only done that on Windows Server 2003. Besides using a spare HDD as a holding tank for the ASR backup file, I also tried transplanting the file onto a DVD and then restoring a Windows Server 2003 domain controller onto absolutely dissimilar hardware to see if it could manage it.

There was one catch: the backup file can't be Read-Only, so I had to use the Explorer window provided by ASR to copy the file off of the DVD and onto the HDD, then point ASR at that copy of it. It restored the whole AD domain on completely different hardware, minus the necessary drivers for the new motherboard and its NIC.

But I imagine you don't relish the thought of steering a cranky distrustful older lady through that process :evil: Maybe... thin client?

 

[mechBgon]

Oh, and I've heard of an app called DeepFreeze that's said to be effective. But I haven't looked into it, so I'm not sure if it's suited for an office scenario. My sister swears by it for the loaner laptops at the local University where she's a librarian.

 

[imported_Ned Flanders]

We use Altiris at work.

 

[nweaver]

Originally posted by: Ned Flanders
We use Altiris at work.

Altiris MIGHT work, but you would need to put some thought into this. I have used altiris for a long time. What you would need to do, is install a local PXE server (possibly a console) on the DHCP server at each site. Create the image and store it locally on the D: Drive. When you get a call that a computer is messed up, you open the console and schedule a rebuild. tell the EU to reboot and it goes automagiclly. You could also have a "Rebuild" menu option in PXE, so that when they boot, if it's hosed, they can select "rebuild" and just wait the 10 minutes for the image to spool from partition to partition.

 

[jbritt1234]

We use PXE at our larger corporate site, works great with Ghost. Some of our small sites don't have Servers though, that's why we want to make it all self contained if possible. Some are home offices etc. There is no other PC available to use. That's why booting off some media on the same PC or another partition seems to be our best option at this point.

 

[Netopia]

Originally posted by: jbritt1234
We use PXE at our larger corporate site, works great with Ghost. Some of our small sites don't have Servers though, that's why we want to make it all self contained if possible. Some are home offices etc. There is no other PC available to use. That's why booting off some media on the same PC or another partition seems to be our best option at this point.

That's what I was thinking. As you slowly upgrade (which you said you're doing) several older machines will become available. Use them at various sites as the server holding the PXE boot image and such. So the client computer would just net boot.

The challenge you will have in the future though is storage. The largest FAT32 partition you can make for Ghost is 32GB (without jumping through hoops) and if you store multiple image revisions on a machine (especially Vista) you could eat this up.

I usually make my 2nd partition a 32GB FAT32 one and just hide it in Windows. When I roll out a computer, I put an image on that partition AND on a server in the domain so that I've got some redundancy.

Joe

 

[nweaver]

Originally posted by: Netopia

Originally posted by: jbritt1234
We use PXE at our larger corporate site, works great with Ghost. Some of our small sites don't have Servers though, that's why we want to make it all self contained if possible. Some are home offices etc. There is no other PC available to use. That's why booting off some media on the same PC or another partition seems to be our best option at this point.

That's what I was thinking. As you slowly upgrade (which you said you're doing) several older machines will become available. Use them at various sites as the server holding the PXE boot image and such. So the client computer would just net boot.

The challenge you will have in the future though is storage. The largest FAT32 partition you can make for Ghost is 32GB (without jumping through hoops) and if you store multiple image revisions on a machine (especially Vista) you could eat this up.

I usually make my 2nd partition a 32GB FAT32 one and just hide it in Windows. When I roll out a computer, I put an image on that partition AND on a server in the domain so that I've got some redundancy.

Joe

I would just use CD Rom boot images (can be made in Altiris) to boot the PC and start the imaging. That way, if a CD Rom walks off, all you lose is DOS, not your image. Second partition idea should work, I couldn't see you needing more then 1 or maybe 2 images on a machine, so 32GB is more then enough to hold older images.

Again, I push for Altiris, but that's because my only experience with ghost/ghostcast was crappy....not to mention, Altiris adds HUGE management capabilities for your larger sites. Not sure on licensing, as we basiclly have a lifetime license for lots of PC's from Altiris.

 

[jbritt1234]

Thanks for the input so far.

Netopia: That's definitely what we would like to do, the biggest thing holding us back from taking the "old" pc's to use as PXE or data repositories is that most of our PC's are leased. When they hit that lease return date, they have to go back. So, we don't actually have that many "old" pc's laying around. The way we have it set up, 32 gigs of storage on that partition would be more than enough. Saving multiple images would be great, but really all we need at this point is room to save one master image, 2+ to 8+ gigs for XP or Vista in the future.

nweaver: Using a CD-Rom, weather it be from Ghost or Altiris, is looking like the way we will end up going. I was REALLY just hoping for using some "free" way of doing this. Using a Windows PE or linux option for example. We currently own Ghost and most likely won't be able to "upgrade" to Altiris. I am actually pretty happy with Ghost, but have heard lots of good stuff about Altiris. Maybe in the future.

Any other off-the-cuff style options would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

Jason

 

[Netopia]

Jason,

I have made a boot cd with both PATA and SATA dos CD drivers (for newer machines) that I use for ghost. It installs net drivers and allows for log in on the domain, so you can ghost to any machine you have room to store the image on. This is where I got most of the stuff: http://www.netbootdisk.com/forums/index.php

Do you think that you could convince your company to buy at least one large hard drive for each of your locations, and format that as a huge NTFS partition and install it into one of your lower work load workstations? This could become your network repository for Ghost images and that way you wouldn't HAVE to have a dedicated server just for Ghost. After you've imaged a machine (either to the local drive or to this huge drive across the network) you could then make a copy of the image to the other place so that you've got some redundancy. So, if you Ghost to the local Fat32 partition on the local drive, then afterwards, get back into Windows and copy that Ghost image over to the big network share. If you only have the image in one location and the DRIVE itself dies, you're in trouble.

Which version of Ghost are you using? Many versions don't play well with SATA controllers or mixed SATA/PATA on a motherboard and Ghost can seem to hang a machine because it is responding so slowly (right from the command line). The way around this is by issuing -FNI when launching. For instance, I normally type:

ghost -FNI -span -auto -z1

Be aware that with this switch Ghost is slower than without this switch (PATA drives only), but without it you can't really do anything that uses SATA.

Joe

 

[jbritt1234]

Joe

I'm going to look at that forum, looks like there could be some good info there, thanks!

We will see about the HDD option. It's not the cheapest way to go, but if we can present a business case for a need, hopefully we can get something like that.

We currently use Ghost v10 and image using PXE/tftp

Thanks man!