NT Workstation duplication

[Patrick J. LoPresti]

Gregory Leblanc <GLeblanc at cu-portland.edu> writes:

> O.K. this is getting WAY offtopic, but how well does a dd imagefile
> compress with gzip?

Same as anything else, about 2:1 for typical contents.

We are using an imaging solution here which I am just now putting the
finishing touches on.  I made a custom bootable Linux CD which knows
enough about our network to have working autofs mounts through /net.
I also made a bootable DOS CD containing Partition Magic and
PowerQuest's "sidchngr".

To install a new Windows machine, our process goes something like
this:

  1) Boot from Linux CD, log in as root

  2) cd /net/server/images/whatever

  3) dd if=boot.b of=/dev/hda  (This sets up the boot block and
     partition table)

  4) sfdisk -R /dev/hda  (Tells kernel to re-read partition table)

  5) zcat image.gz | dd of=/dev/hda1  (Takes 3-7 minutes for us, but
     we have a 100Mbit network and fast machines)

  6a) For Windows 98, use GNU parted to resize partition to occupy
      entire drive.

  6b) For Windows NT, boot Partition Magic CD and use it to resize.

  7) (NT only) Run sidchngr

  8) Boot system and change hostname


Creating the images is a little painful, but I figure I don't have to
do it very often.  My procedure is to resize the partition down to
leave 50-100 megs of free space, then use "dd if=/dev/zero of=zeroes ;
sync ; rm zeroes" to clear that space (for better compression).  I
also delete the swap file first, since both 98 and NT appear to
re-create it without fuss.  Then I do "dd if=/dev/hda of=boot.b bs=512
count=1" to grab the boot block and partition table, and "dd
if=/dev/hda | gzip -9 > image.gz" to create the image.

Sure, it's not completely turnkey and it doen'tt have fancy features
like multicasting.  But it is simple, comprehensible, and does not
require you to figure out DOS networking...

 - Pat