Ghost/FOG imaging over wireless??

[ba9ag]

Has anyone done this? Is it possible?

 

With the introduction of netbooks and the increased usage of laptops and trolleys of laptops added to g and n wireless, this has got to be a logical step for imaging. I don't recall anyone posting anything about this though.

 

Any ideas?

[danrhodes]

Never tired Ghost over wireless I don't imagine even with N it will be any good, or even if it would get an IP, you could run some trials and post your results.

 

D

[ba9ag]

It'd be nice to have that kind of free time

[round2it]

ghost over wireless is a pain

 

i tried it once then give up

[ba9ag]

ghost over wireless is a pain

 

multicast is a big no no here

 

But you have acheived it though? What type of wireless were you running, g? When you did it did you isolate the imaging from the rest of the network?

[round2it]

wireless g

netgear wg302

 

no one was in the building and it was painfully slow (hence the give up)

 

i just use clonezilla now and whack in a cable it is much easier

[dezt]

We didn't even look at doing it when we got the laptop trolleys, we decided to ghost cable instead.

[CraigM]

Question: can wireless cards even PXE boot? Granted I haven't spent much time looking, but I didn't think that they could. Building Ghost boot disks would be even more painful, trying to get a wireless driver working under DOS.

 

Also, what about Multicast? Unicast would kill a G switch very quickly indeed.

[danrhodes]

Question: can wireless cards even PXE boot? Granted I haven't spent much time looking, but I didn't think that they could. Building Ghost boot disks would be even more painful, trying to get a wireless driver working under DOS.

 

Also, what about Multicast? Unicast would kill a G switch very quickly indeed.

 

My thoughts exactly Craig, I don't know if Wireless can PXE boot googling about seems to show that it can be done for VMWare images, and there has been chat about it on here before but wether anybody has ever managed to get it working smoothly is another thing.

 

D

[LukeC]

I have imaged laptops wirelessly with ghost, howevere they needed to have a version of windows installed so i could install the client version of ghost this worked but was slow i wasnt actually meant to do it i was going to image witha cable qand forgot to plug it as i had all the functions of the network hence wireless.

[SimpleSi]

AFAIK your wireless isn't up and running at PXE boot time so its a non-starter there.

 

I used to use ghost in a manner by partitioning drives into 2 and then saving 1st partition as image in 2nd one - sending that wirelessly over network to working machines to their 2nd partitions and then restoring 1st partitions from that image.

 

With new machines I use either FOG (But via cat5e into a portable switch) if the netbooks seem to work with it and booting clonezilla off a USB pen drive and then restoring images from a portable hard drive if I can't get FOG to work.

 

I haven't tried using clonezilla to restore image over network but as long as clonezilla recognises your wireless setup then it should work.

 

 

regards

 

Simon

[Martin]

It appears that you can PXE-boot over wireless, but you definitely don't want to be deploying images that way.

 

As well as limited bandwidth, you are not going to be able to multicast if you are deploying multiple machines.

 

mb

[CraigM]

It appears that you can PXE-boot over wireless, but you definitely don't want to be deploying images that way.

 

As well as limited bandwidth, you are not going to be able to multicast if you are deploying multiple machines.

 

mb

 

I read through that thread and can't find the product they talking about on the Argon website. However, not having multicast is a real pain, not to mention that with images growing in size, a deployment could take hours if not days on a heavily used AP.

 

I guess this is one area where good old cables still trumps wireless

[ba9ag]

 

I used to use ghost in a manner by partitioning drives into 2 and then saving 1st partition as image in 2nd one - sending that wirelessly over network to working machines to their 2nd partitions and then restoring 1st partitions from that image.

 

 

We use this system at the moment but generally only for a quick restore function but it sounds like a good plan - can't believe I didn't think of it before. Did you write a script to deploy the image to the second partition and then restore?