[Tfug] Clonezilla and bare metal backups or, "Symantec Ghost - I'm leaving you"

[Eric Gearhart]

Has anyone setup a Clonezilla server, to image
computers/servers/laptops remotely (look ma no CD or USB stick!) via
PXE booting?

I just set this up at work the other day, and it's completely awesome.
I can press F12 on the Dell servers as they boot, they PXE boot off
the network, then I'm presented with a menu asking if I want to save
an image of the server I'm on or restore an image to the server I'm
on.

When the servers are imaged, if they're using a partimage supported
filesystem (ext2, ext3, ntfs, I'm sure there's more...) partimage will
only image the used space on the partition and not just blindly "dd"
over the entire partition, saving time and bandwidth. Also as
partitions are imaged, different compression is available as well
ranging from "none" to "lots."

http://packratstudios.com/index.php/2008/04/20/how-to-setup-clonezilla-on-linux-ubuntu-quick-start-guide/
was the quick start guide that lays everything out quickly and simply.

I've tested this on both Linux and Windows servers, and it works great
for both. Seems like an excellent FOSS bare metal backup solution than
can even properly image proprietary OSes

Also on the Windows side, you can apparently setup "winroll" which
will allow you to change the Windows Security Identifier (SID), which
is something you're "really supposed to do" when imaging Windows
servers... different things can get really wonky when two SIDs are
exactly the same on two separate machines on the network (AD computer
accounts can get weird, etc)

--
Eric
http://nixwizard.net