subscribe to our feed.If you have ever had to reimage many computers at once, you know how much of a pain that is. It can literally take days if you do them all by hand. You quickly realize that there has to be a better way. You start to dream of some software that would allow you to take a snapshot of a computer, save it, then push that image out to another machine. Then you get greedy. What if that could push it out to many machines, all at once? Well, many others have thought the same. That’s why Norton came out with their Ghost product. The problem is that Norton Ghost can cost a lot of money. Their enterprise version can cost up to $40 a license. Well, if you’re imaging 100 machines, that gets expensive very quickly. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a free version? Duh…..
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A friend of mine needed a cheap, as in free, solution to deploy multiple machines. I searched around for different options and finally settled on the DRBL project, aka Clonezilla. The first thing you need to know is that this is a Linux solution. But don’t sigh, please. Linux has come a long, long way in terms of user friendliness, device support, etc. I first tried setting DRBL up on Fedora Core, but kept having problems. I was using an older version of Fedora Core, but didn’t want to download the multiple iso’s for the new version. Iso’s are disk images. They have the .iso file extension. And you need to burn them using an iso burner. You can’t simply burn the iso to a disk. But we’ll get into that. Ok, let me walk you through how you can do this, quickly and easily.
**You need two network cards installed on your machine to do this! If you don’t have two network cards, don’t proceed until you have them.**
First, let’s grab the “Dapper” version of Ubuntu. This is 6.06. The only reason I did this is because I had a disk with it on it from a while ago. You can try 6.10, but I haven’t tested it. I’m choosing it because it is really user friendly and it worked with drbl. Ubuntu is simply a flavor of linux. There are many. Now, that download will be in .iso format. To burn that to a disk, you will need an iso burner. And here is another yummy link for all you Windows users. It just so happens that Alex Feinman has made a free iso burner for you! Download it and run the install. Wait for the Ubuntu download to finish and we’re ready for the next step.
Ok, now, put a CD in your CD player and disregard the pop up message if you get one. Now, right click on your Ubuntu iso file and choose burn iso. At least I think that’s what it says. I’m doing that from memory. It will burn the iso image to the disk. Now, when that’s done, we want to boot from the Ubuntu disk. You want to do this on a spare machine that you can reformat! Don’t do this on a machine that you want to keep around. It will destroy all your data. There, that’s a fair warning.
Now, boot your CD on a machine that you want to reformat. It should go into a Ubuntu menu. If it doesn’t, you will need to alter your boot order in your bios. To do that, restart and look for messages on the bottom of the screen to enter setup. These are usually F10 or F2. You may have to restart multiple times to get into it. You have to be fast. Now, once you’re in, you need to find something that says “boot order.” Make sure the CD is first. Now restart your machine and you should see the Ubuntu menu. Go ahead and boot so you can install.
Once Ubuntu is up, you need to double click the install icon on the desktop. This will guide you through the whole setup. Notice that it comes with Open Office - which is compatible with Microsoft Office. Click through the menus at the top left and look around. Linux really is nice. You have to get the networking set up at this point.
Click on “Administration” and go to “Networking.” You will get prompted for an administrative password when you try this. If you can’t figure that out, go to “Applications,” “Accessories,” and then “Terminal.” At the box, type “sudo passwd” - do that without the quotes. Enter in a password. This will be your new “root” password, or super user. Now, you need to set up the network cards. You should have one network card hooked up to your imaging network. This should ideally be completely separate from everything else. Your other network card can be hooked up to the internet. Click on the network card that is hooked up to your imaging network, click the properties button. Enter in a static ip address. I chose 192.168.4.10 for the ip with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0. Don’t worry about the gateway.
Ok, here is one thing you will need to do to get the rest going. You will be logged into a user account that you set up in the install. Go to the “System” menu, then “Administration,” then “Login Window.” Now, go to the “Security” tab. Check the box that says, “Allow local system administrator login.” After that is done, log off. When you get back to the login screen, enter “root” for the username and the password you just entered. You’re now logged in as root.
Now, go to “Places” and “home folder.” Click the orange up arrow in the menu. You will see a bunch of folders. One is “etc.” Click on that. Now, click on the “apt” folder. You will see a file called “sources.list” Click on that. Add this at the bottom:
deb http://free.nchc.org.tw/ubuntu dapper main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://free.nchc.org.tw/drbl-core drbl stable
Now, go back to the terminal, like we did above and enter these commands, pressing enter after each line:
wget http://drbl.nchc.org.tw/GPG-KEY-DRBL; apt-key add GPG-KEY-DRBL
gpg -a –export D7E8DF3A | apt-key add -
Now, type these, pressing enter after each line:
apt-get update
apt-get install drbl
And now, and this is very important in Ubuntu, enter this and press enter:
This will set up your drbl server. It will put in defaults that may not be useable by you in the long run, but it will install all necessary components for Ubuntu to use drbl. Don’t neglect this step. At a later time you can enter in this command to set it up manually. This will allow more clients:
All right, you’re almost done! Now, let’s get the drbl server going and ready to accept clients. Enter this command:
You will now see the interface for drbl. You want to use Clonezilla mode. You select it by pushing the arrows to highlight it and spacebar to select it. Then hit enter to enter your selection. To grab an image off a machine, simply select “Clonezilla-save-disk” on the next menu.
Now, start your machine with your system image. Make sure the network card is first in boot order. And watch it boot into drbl. Choose to save disk - probably the first selection. Once that’s done. You can now go back onto your DRBL server and enter the command:
Now, select Clonezilla mode again. And this time, select “Clonezilla-restore-disk.” Now, start however many machines you want to image and it will cruise. I imaged two machines with XP Pro in 2 minutes! Remember, if you are doing like 50 machines, your dhcp scope is probably insufficient on your drbl server. Run
to change the scope to a higher number of clients.
There is also a win-roll component of Clonezilla that allows you to automatically enter in computer names, workgroups and such on the machines. I’m just starting to play with that.
This is a great tool for organizations on a shoestring, like schools.
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