Ed Buford - Just Another Geek

Ghost story

We’ve gotten enough questions about Ghost that I thought I’d put together a doc to answer some questions and give you some tips and insights towards getting a good ghost image and deploying it.

This is not a short post!

Get the Ghost

First make certain you have the full blown version of Ghost and the version that comes with System Works or whatever. If you get one of these versions you’ll find it’s crippled and won’t work for deploying Ghost images in your network.

The licensing on the newer versions of Ghost is different then the older versions and you need to buy a license for each machine you’re going to deploy. We buy a license for each of our machines. This seems kind of unfair as we may only Ghost a machine once, deploy it and ignore it until it’s time to get rid of it…. but we really do want to be in compliance.

To Sysprep or not to Sysprep

So if you have a full blown version of Ghost and you’re ready to get started the next thing you need to think about is whether or not you need to sysprep the system you are creating an image of. The short answer is a simple one, if the machine will belong to a domain then yes you must sysprep it. If it will never belong to a domain you don’t have to sysprep it. However if you don’t sysprep an image and deploy it and then join it to a domain you’ll have problems. You can always run a sysprep on an image later by deploying it to a box, running sysprep on it and collecting an image from there.

If you want the long answer as to why you need to sysprep let me know and we can talk about SIDs and GUIDs.

Assuming you need to sysprep your image machine the first thing you’ll need to do is locate sysprep so you can use it. You can find it on you XP CD under \Support\Tools\Deploy.cab extract the deploy.cab, sysprep is inside.

On the Image machine create a folder on the root of the C: drive called sysprep and place the extracted files in it. You can create a sysprep.ini using a program found in the deploy.cab called Setupmgr.exe. 

This will walk you through a building a sysprep.ini file for you environment. If you’re running this tool I can assume you’ve installed Windows before and this will all seem familiar to you. I use the setup manager to create a new Sysprep.ini file and I tell it to Fully Automate the install (even though I make it stop where I want it to).

There are some things I want to mention to you about the Setup Manager. The first has to do with your Product Key; if your using a Volume License put the key in correctly now.

If you’re not using Volume Licenses and are using the Product ID (PID) sticker that came with machine then don’t put a valid license in at this time…. Just fill the key up with Xs or something so Windows will stop and ask you for the key during setup.

The other thing is the name of the machine; the Setup Manager gives you the option of auto-generating a name for the target machine, but names

like BT2375XW don’t help me out a lot when I need to remote into a machine.

The downside is if you put a machine name in the Box for the Setup Manager and set it up to join a domain, you can kill another machine’s GUID accidentally if you do. So I edit the sysprep.ini file after I’m done to make it stop and let me name the Machine before the setup continues.

Here is a Sysprep.ini file I've created:

;SetupMgrTag

[Unattended]

    OemSkipEula=Yes

[GuiUnattended]

    AdminPassword="Password"      Put the local admin password here

    EncryptedAdminPassword=NO

    OEMSkipRegional=1

    TimeZone=40

    OemSkipWelcome=1

[UserData]

    ProductID=XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX Put product key here

    FullName="John Doe"          Put the name of the responsible person here

    OrgName="Any Church"  Put the org name here

    ComputerName=G*      You can see here where I put an asterisk which will force it

                                                To stop and let me name the machine

[Display]

    BitsPerPel=32

    Xresolution=1024

    YResolution=768

    Vrefresh=72

[SetupMgr]

    DistFolder=C:\sysprep\i386

    DistShare=whistlerdist

[Identification]

    JoinDomain=domain                         Windows Domain to Join

    DomainAdmin=domain\tech  Account of user who can join machine to domain

    DomainAdminPassword=password  Password for user to join machine

[Networking]

    InstallDefaultComponents=Yes

Now go to the run box and type C:\sysprep\sysprep

Check the box for Mini-Setup and reseal

Ok Now let’s talk Ghost!

Give it the Boot

The simplest of all ways to capture or deploy a Ghost image is with a floppy boot disk. Yes I know it’s true that many machines no longer come with a floppy disk. If this is your case let me know and I’ll get you instructions on setting up a PXE boot solution.

Now before you can make a boot disk you need to know what kind of NIC you have in your box. The Ghost Boot Wizard has many popular drivers pre-populated in it for you but on the off chance you’re NIC isn’t in the list you’ll need to go to the manufacturer to get the drivers. You’ll be looking for DOS drivers (I usually go for the NDIS driver). The Ghost Boot Wizard will let you import the driver and create a boot disk set.

Lauch the Wizard and Choose Network Boot Disk

Choose your NIC, if it's not in the list you can Click the Add Button.

I like to keep some 3com 3c905s on hand for many reasons... and when I run into some whack NIC I can't find the right drivers for or get to work right I slam it in the box and presto it does what I want it to.

We use Dell machines and I like to capture the Diagnostics partition so I like to make sure I get the whole disk. One of the easiest ways to do this is automate the Ghost session. So I set the parameters to a Session I call 0. Now I could call this session anything I want it to be but I always use the same session for everything so I can reuse boot disks in the future without having to alter them.
In order to set this to a session called 0 you need to include the line -ja=0  If you wanted to use 1 or test or whatever just put it after the = instead of 0.

I won't bore you with the rest of the screen caps from the wizard; however I would like to tell you that I use DHCP for assigning an IP rather than Staticly assigning an IP as it cuts down on the number of boot disks I have to keep.

Danger Will Robinson

Ok before we go any farther let me tell you not to run this on your network!
If you run this on your regular network it will swamp your network and no one will like you anymore.  My Ghost server is also my desktop so I installed second NIC in my box and I feed all the Ghost Multi-Cast session over the second NIC. If you have VLAN switches you can setup a VLAN to run this on... I'll let you figure out the networking but remember I warned you :)

Get it on the Wire

We're almost ready to lauch the GhostCast Server, but before we do I just want to remind you that these Ghost images are not small and you need to consider space when you capture images. I have a monster drive in my desktop for keeping Ghost images. Remember each Image is roughly the size of the actual size of the image on the computer you're capturing from.

OK let's launch the GhostCast server

Worth a Laugh Update.

If you read my last post about Dell Support, let me tell you how that ended. Monday I got a Referb drive from Dell and put it in the laptop and powered it on. I had everything set up to Ghost it, but when it came up I was most shocked to see a password protection screen for the hard drive. I called Dell support and spent the next 66 minutes while the tech tried to figure out how to unlock the drive. Finally they ended up sending me yet another Referb’d unit that works.

All in all if I weren’t laughing about this I think I’d cry!

Worth a laugh

Our Executive Director of Creative Arts brought his laptop to me today; his hard drive failed was making a very sickening noise. He was fairly certain everything was backed up and safe, so no big deal. I call Dell Gold Support only to find out it was not covered by Dell Gold, but by Next Business Day support instead. This support is a few rungs down the ladder from Gold Support and yet miles above home support. So they transfer my call and after a long wait I get a tech.

Now when you have Gold Support if you tell them the drives dead they tend to believe you and ship out a drive, not so with Next Biz Day. So I tell the Tech the drives toast and hold the phone over the laptop and ask him if he can hear the drive and he says he can, but then he starts walking me through the troubleshooting matrix. I boot it to Dell Diagnostics and it doesn’t see the drive and doesn’t give the tech the error code he’s looking for. I boot into the BIOS and tell him it doesn’t see the drive there, this goes on for awhile while the actuator arm slams against the spindle so loudly you can heard it thirty feet away. Finally he says he’ll send me a new drive.

Now you won’t believe this part… but now the tech tells me to backup any important data on my hard drive. I begin to laugh uncontrollably; finally, tears in my eyes, I tell him that I can’t get to my data because the hard drive is dead. Then he asks me if I’ve tried to boot into safe mode? I’m laughing so hard now I’m falling out of my chair; I finally recover and explain to him that data and the operating system are on the hard drive and when the hard drive dies so does the data.

I know I’ve complained about Gold Support before…. But it will be a long time before I complain about it again.

Every Port in a Storm

For this weeks Favorite I thought I'd give you a great little tool CurrPorts.

This sweet little tool will tell not only tell you what ports your listening on but also gives you the IP address and other spicy stuff of the machine  you're connected to.

Download CurrPorts from Nirsoft

Getting the best Price

I'm constantly hunting to get the best price on stuff. Whether it's trying to get the best deal on a hard drive or looking for a Banjo (which I am incidentally) my favorite place to start is PriceGrabber. It’s helped me more times than I can count… give it a try.

Computer Standards

My children attend a small private school which is parentally governed. My involvement is on the Tech Board. I’ve been tasked with job of developing PC Standards. It’s going to be an interesting adventure. We will have to define the goals for PC usage before we can begin to define PC Standards.

These are the High level objectives for the team:

1.  Establishing PC standard for CCS

2.  Establish a PC refresh program

3.  Develop a plan to support requests for new technology

I would love to hear ideas about how to attack this…