- Introduction
- "Remote Boot" and Remote Control
- Using Ghost Successfully
- To Ghost or Not To Ghost
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Using Ghost Successfully
Jason McKinney, a system administrator at the Washington State Liquor Control Board, uses Ghost. According to McKinney, the Board currently has about 1,100 computers located in stores across the state, as either "smart" cash registers or backroom PCs for managers to handle management, payroll, email, Web access, and other tasks. Data generally doesn't reside on these machines, but is pushed upstream to GHQ (headquarters), using either dial-up or frame-relay connections.
"We're using Ghost the way a lot of people are using it," says McKinney. "We send new desktop machines out to replace old ones. We buy yearly or every other year, roughly, replacing a third of the machines each two years, or whatever. We purchase and prepare machines here at GHQ, and then send them out. We use Ghost to load a standard image." To do this, McKinney reports, "I set up a process in the Liquor Board so it can be done at the desktop or at the user's station, from any network station with proper user authentication. I have to 'visit' each new machine long enough to plug it into the network and log onto it in the network boot environment, in order to confirm I'm allowed to zero the disk out, but from there we can load it using the Ghost console and client. We may also use Ghost Corporate's multicast feature...we've done it with [up to] twenty systems at a time. We use snapshots from a fully prepared machine, e.g., a lab machine for our training lab, and then re-image them back."
For the most part, McKinney uses Ghost simply to deploy the initial image. "Our users aren't installing things; our goal is for them to not install anything. Once they're deployed, the only time you use Ghost again is if something goes bad, and you need to re-image." He also uses Ghost to take an image of a server for archival purposes. "For example, before I decommission a server, I Ghost an image, and put that image on a tape—and hopefully never need it again."
Rather than provide users with CDs containing a copy of the Ghost system image, McKinney says, "Since we have techs go on rounds to the stores often enough, if somebody needs a reload we tend to send out hard drives with images on them and swap them in. Nobody has yet undertaken the task of setting up a restore CD, which would require multiple CDs—the hardware currently doesn't have a DVD drive. Also, our current approach avoids someone in the store thinking that using those restore CDs might solve something...and [wiping] out their entire system."