Ghosting/Ghostcasting questions...

[ddrueding]

I have Symantec Ghost 8.0 Corporate and am looking for a way to enter a ghostcasting session manually from the client.

In the "home" version of ghost, you can run the command from the start menu that reboots into the virtual partiton; where you can manually perform any of the tasks.

In the corp version, you can enter a client that is very similar via a boot disk set. The only difference is that this one allows you to join ghostcast sessions.

I want to be able to reboot into a manual client session via a virtual partition that will allow me to access ghostcasting sessions.

Help?

 

[sechs]

Try creating a virtual partition or Ghost boot partition. You should be able to do this with Gdisk.

I've never done either of these, so a trip through the documentation would be in order. It's a group of PDFs in the Ghost install folder.

 

[blakerwry]

ghost casting is meant for use with multiple machines.. IE: multicast...

Initiating a multicast from the client sounds backwards... like requesting that an FM radio station start and stop with a single listener turning on their radio...

 

[ddrueding]

ghost casting is meant for use with multiple machines.. IE: multicast...

Initiating a multicast from the client sounds backwards... like requesting that an FM radio station start and stop with a single listener turning on their radio...

Absolutely true, and deploying an image out to multiple machines works very well that way. But I'm creating images on the machines and sending them too the ghostcast server.

To be honest it doesn't much matter where it is initiated from, but I would like to be able to manually control the session from the client. Is there a switch I can add to the Ghost Console Task that will make it reboot into the virtual partition and then wait for directions?

Try creating a virtual partition or Ghost boot partition. You should be able to do this with Gdisk.

I've never done either of these, so a trip through the documentation would be in order. It's a group of PDFs in the Ghost install folder.

I've been reading the PDF's and accoring to them the virtual partition is a single file on the main partition formatted as FAT12. When a task is initiated, the MBR is modified to point to this file until the task is complete.



To create an actual partition at the beginning of the drive (it would have to be at the beginning, right?) would require some tweaking with my existing WinXP install that I haven't had much success with. Figuring this out would work, as I have a ghost image of what this partition should look like (created with Ghost Boot Wizard).

 

[sechs]

Ghost Enterprise is very nifty. While you could theoretically control a remote image dump from the Ghostcast server, I find it easier to open up the console and manually start a session from the client.

 

[ddrueding]

I find it easier to open up the console and manually start a session from the client.

Perfect! This is exactlty what I want to do! How?

 

[sechs]

After setting up the console on the server, boot the client with a network disk and load Ghost and choose Ghostcast >> Unicast and fill in the info.

 

[ddrueding]

My clients have no floppy and no CD-ROM.

I'm currently configuring a "console partition" that will be at the beginning of the drive and contain the neccisary stuff. Then I'll install XP into the main partition and use the boot.ini to manage both of them.

Does anyone see a reason why this won't work?

 

[sechs]

Is this one of the special types of Ghost partitions, or just a FAT partition with DOS and the necessary drivers to run a Ghost network session?

 

[ddrueding]

At first it was going to be a ghost console partition; currently it is a ghostcasting partition. I was trying to set up a drive mapping version; it doesn't even need to have ghost on it, or have anything to do with ghost. So long as it can map to a network share where the ghost images and the executeable reside.

 

[sechs]

Personally, I'd go with the Ghostcast server, but, if you can't get the drive-mapping to work, that should be fine.

 

[ddrueding]

The mapping just works better for my rather unusual setup. Every machine has it's own Ghost image, that is only restored to that one machine. Therefore going though the process of setting up and running a different ghostcast session for every machine is more difficult than just letting the workstations execute a batch file on their local drive that pulls the correct image.