Now entering Silent Hill…

One of the big things on my agenda last night (outside of facilitating a major server upgrade entirely provided by a third party — gotta love free upgrades!) was reconfiguring the BIOS for every computer station in the office to boot via network first, hard drive second. Recently, I set up Free Open Ghost, an open-source version of Norton Ghost, which allows you to clone a computer install and re-image either the same computer, or another computer, with the identical image, all over the network. I’ve got it configured now such that I can add a computer to the to-be-reformatted queue, go and restart it, and it will boot from network first and check in with the FOG server, so that it knows to download a disk image (which isn’t necessarily the full size of the hard drive, either — one of my main images is a mere 3 gigs and contains a full Windows XP Pro installation with a bunch of work-specific configuraiton), automatically rename itself to the hostname it’s been assigned, automatically join the domain and assign itself to the proper Organizational Unit in Active Directory, then after one manual reboot will install all the software that it’s supposed to get from that OU. It is so goddamn slick to be able to reformat and have a computer back in working order in under an hour with so little intervention by myself that I am almost unnecessary (save of course for my ability to keep all these little R&D gadgets that I’ve set up, functional).

I had been working at this place prior to landing the IT gig, and have a very vivid memory of the old IT guy (hey Clifton, remember Nicholson?) freaking out when there was a Blaster worm outbreak in the centre. He was very much the type of IT guy that hated to be disturbed and was put out by every least bit of inconvenience; to see him running around like a fool manually reformatting all the stations and getting annoyed every time anyone would even look at him sideways was, to this day, exemplar of exactly what IT should not be, and he is my constant reminder that complacency breeds inefficiency. Between him and Chiltzy (who Clifton would also remember), I have a good deal of goodwill still built up in my favour where all I have to do is be better than either of them, and I’ve proven how awesome I am.

Even though I could remove the virus from every station without leaving my office, and without a reformat, if I wanted to, I could cordon off an entire section of the floor and use Free Open Ghost’s Multicast feature to send the disk image to every station simultaneously thus not flooding our network or having to wait one at a time for each station to rebuild itself. I could then simply walk around to each station and manually reboot once about half an hour in (so that they all pick up Group Policy — that’s the one kink to being wholly unattended that I can’t yet work out), and the entire section of the centre would be ready for production in maybe a little over an hour, given any unforeseen circumstances.

And yes, Free Open Ghost is Linux-based, and wholly open-source. And even without being OSS, it would have won me over with its intuitiveness and mammoth functionality. If you have any need for disk-imaging, look into it. It would even work in a small home network environment, you’d just need a Linux server (see here if you want one but need a jump start at it) and a hard drive with a bit of extra space to start off with.

(Free Open Ghost = FOG — Get the title now? Okay, it was admittedly pretty lame.)

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Now entering Silent Hill…
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