Chris Purcell wrote:
One thing I've heard of people doing in the past is using rsync. You have a master workstation that you make the changes to. Then you keep a copy of the entire workstation filesystem on some central server. Each time you make a change, you upload a copy. You have all the workstations you deploy scheduled via cron to rsync against this server daily or whenever you like. If you don't use the master workstation for anything else, you could just have them rsync directly to it.
We manage PC labs of several hundred machines with a commercial product
called Rembo Took Kit, http://www.rembo.com/products_toolkit.htm. Depending on your requirements and budgest, it could be an option for you.
Hi Jason,
That rsync idea sounds like a good idea, if you were on a high speed LAN. Our remote offices are connected via either frame relay or DSL (VPN). rsync connections would completely saturate the lines, not too mentioned the RAM on the central server.
This Rembo toolkit seems like its just used for cloning and deploying machines? We're using Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition 8.0 right now and its working great for us for deploying Windows and Linux machines.
Thanks, Chris
Actually, I think rsync is ideal for low bandwidth situtations. It only replicates changes. You can change a line in a file on the master and only that line gets changed on the slave, the whole file doesn't get copied. I'd definitely use it over DSL or Frame-Relay. Rembo actually does much more. It also can be used to just synchronize the changes. You can also use it to edit text files, modify registry, push patches, collect inventory information and put it into a datbase (MySQL, etc) and much more. We've had much better luck with it than with Ghost both from a performance and a capability point of view. Jason ===========