Automating the Ghost process. Can it be done?

[grandchehaw]

I am in charge of creating and ghosting computers for a large library system. We have 100+ public stations at a 8 sites. Our imaging cycle seems to be about every 4 months. We have 4 different models between our 8 sites.

The current way we roll out an image is by going to each site with a laptop that holds our images. We have to go into the BIOS of each machine to allow booting from floppy drive. Then connect to the Ghost server running off the laptop. Then after the image is finished we go back into the BIOS, disable the booting from floppy and make the necessary changes such as host name, ect.

As you can see this is a pretty clunky method. I also don't like the fact of relying on a floppy disk to reimage a machine. There always seems to be one computer out of the batch that has a bad floppy drive. So that means taking it back to the main branch to repair it or do an onsite repair if we have a drive with us.

A friend of mine who works for a school district has ZENworks and swears by it. The ghosting process he uses is really slick. It has this small linux partition on it that connects to the server and sees if it has work to be done. If it does it will carry out the instructions. If it doesn't have anything to do, it will reboot the system and boot into Windows. We have a Netware 6 server that we could install ZENworks on. The only downside I see to ZENworks is how much it costs. It also has a lot of other features that we probably wouldn't use any time soon.

Is there anything out there that does something similar like ZENworks? What steps have you taken to try to automate your ghosting process? OpenSource ideas/suggestions welcomed.

-grandchehaw

[John Prophet]

what about making simple restore disks using ghost? I mean putting the images on burnt cd's

JP

JP good idea, but they will still he will need to go into the bios and change the boot to cd rom

[DVNT1]

Ghost Enterprise version may do what you want.

I my come up with other ideas later but short on time now.

im reading and learning about the ghost console in ghost 8. ill see if this is right up your alley

[dystopialives]

perhaps does the ghosting program have a command line option? I'd say put the image on the pc itself and set it up to do it automatically in windows scheduler, might need a new login script to disable editting it tho.