For any of you who manage networks of 5 or more machines, and need to make regular backups of your machines, this has been my favorite solution over the years. I’ve always been concerned that this project has been authored and maintained by a single person, but… It’s so good…
Like all cloning software, it’s completely OS, file system, etc agnostic. It just clones disks, compresses and stores on a central FTP server.
And, like all FOSS, the price is right.
TSU
(g4u announcement)
| Just right in time for its 18th birthday, I have released the 2nd beta
|
version for g4u 2.6 (2.6beta2). It took some time to get to this point,
and I want to move to 2.6 soon - please take your time to test and get
back to me soon, as I want to push out g4u version 2.6 in june 2017.
g4u ("ghosting for unix") is a NetBSD-based bootfloppy/CD-ROM that
allows easy cloning of PC harddisks to deploy a common setup on a
number of PCs using FTP. The floppy/CD offers two functions. The first
is to upload the compressed image of a local harddisk to a FTP server,
the other is to restore that image via FTP, uncompress it and write it
back to disk. Network configuration is fetched via DHCP. As the
harddisk is processed as an image, any filesystem and operating system
can be deployed using g4u. Easy cloning of local disks as well as
partitions is also supported.
For more information, see [1]http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/.
Changes in 2.6beta2 include:
* Make this build with NetBSD-current sources as of 2017-04-17,
binaries were cross-compiled from Mac OS X 10.10
* Go back to keeping the disk image inside the kernel as ramdisk, do
not load it as separate module. Less error prone, and allows to
boot the g4u (NetBSD) kernel from a single file e.g. via PXE
(Testing and documentation updates welcome!)
* Actually DO provide the g4u (NetBSD) kernel with the embedded g4u
disk image from now on, as separate file, g4u-kernel.gz
* Put all object files into one object directory. This may need more
cleanup in the future. Feedback from people building g4u welcome!
* Disable verbose device messages on Microchannel (MCA) machines
* New drivers:
+ Toshiba Dynabook hotkeys
+ Intel S1200,C2000 (non-pch) SMBus storage controller
+ Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) storage controllers and
devices
+ Intel Wireless WiFi Link 7xxx PCI network
+ Intel 8259x 10 gigabit PCI network
+ Realtek 8188CE/8192CE 802.11b/g/n PCI network
+ VMware VMXNET3
+ Marvell Libertas PCMCIA network
+ ASIX AX88178a/AX88179 based USB network adapters
+ Realtek RTS5209/RTS5229 Card Reader
* Happy 18th Birthday, g4u!
Download links:
* The g4u 2.6beta2 floppy images ([2]zipped/ uncompressed [3]floppy
one, [4]floppy two, [5]floppy three, and [6]floppy four)
* The g4u 2.6beta2 ISO CD image ([7]zipped/[8]uncompressed)
* The [9]g4u/NetBSD kernel for PXE boot (gzipped)
* The [10]g4u 2.6beta2 source code
* Some md5 checksums:
MD5 (g4u-2.6beta2-1.fs) = 8214c1ded55e78aed2f34d3e318dc75d
MD5 (g4u-2.6beta2-2.fs) = 8b55f3fe6a4806c9a65a3d176463e1bc
MD5 (g4u-2.6beta2-3.fs) = 0f9629353ddd470d17c5b4fd4ec7fd8e
MD5 (g4u-2.6beta2-4.fs) = c25a955e5d876d64943fd03f957ed4c9
MD5 (g4u-2.6beta2.iso) = acabb0fb73d4a2f9062fb070b4ddd825
MD5 (g4u-2.6beta2.tgz) = f8387d5bf146f98dda040dfcc1c53e44
MD5 (g4u-2.6beta2.fs.zip) = 8ef324c71ae7b000708e69019e55ef4e
MD5 (g4u-2.6beta2.iso.zip) = 1f4bd37784405350ee3e8e6c75a6b6b6
References
1. http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/
2. http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-2.6beta2.fs.zip
3. http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-2.6beta2-1.fs
4. http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-2.6beta2-2.fs
5. http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-2.6beta2-3.fs
6. http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-2.6beta2-4.fs
7. http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-2.6beta2.iso.zip
8. http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-2.6beta2.iso
9. http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-kernel-2.6beta2.gz
10. http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4u-2.6beta2.tgz
Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world’s most
engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot
g4u-announce mailing list
g4u-announce@feyrer.de
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/g4u-announce
|||