Enterprise Ghost for Linux

[Stringent]

Currently we have a copy of Symantec Ghost Enterprise edition which we use to ghost up our machines and pull images off of. Its currently got Windows Server. Is there a similar program which will run on a Linux distro? If possible to use the current ghost files to send the images down onto machines.

Just thinking it would make life easier, as its a trial of 2003 server which expires soon, don't really want to fork out another server license JUST for the laptop. Bit of a waste.

Cheers.

[ikonia]

there are a few cloning / image programs but nothing as "enterprise" as ghost.

(quick side note)
I've seen lots of people try to use ghost to roll out linux images, and it seems to be hit and miss on how effective it is, ghost seems to have problems with certain boot loaders in certain conditions, and on some occasions partitioning of disks causes it problems.

This seems to be because ghost is written with windows OS's as images in mind.
(end note)

From what you've said it appears you just using the windows 2003 as a filel server to host image files, and then using the ghost clients to connect to this server and download the image ? - if thats the case you could use linux as a file server for ghost quite easy, however I don't think you'd be able to use all of the ghost clients features, you'd have to map a drive and tell it to look for images in x:\images\desktops\windows\myimage.img - or something along those lines.

[Stringent]

Well yes it is a file server, but I also need DHCP to assign IP's to the client machines. We are not going to be ghosting any linux machines, I was hoping there would be a similar program for linux which could distribute the ghost files to a number of clients.

[ikonia]

samba file server dhcpd for dynamic address

Any linux distro can do that, you should have no problems if thats what your after.

Although if your not familier with it a bgo standard windows 2003 license may be a cheaper alternative, as they are not that expensive and the initial outlay may be off set against the time of setting this up and getting it working.

[Stringent]

What we might end up doing is getting another 2003 liicense and upgrade one of our 2K servers to 2003, and then use the 2K licence for the ghost server. Or I could dig out NT4 Server. LOL!

Thanks for help/pointers.