Ghost, working with FHC, and other questions
ZaReason
2. Does this list contain any admins for Family History Centers? I just was called & I'm building my resource list. Any great resources I should know about?
3. Does the church's CTO also cover genealogy centers? Who is the head bigwig for FHCs? If not Joel Dehlin, does s/he put out information in any format?
4. Have any of you successfully loaded Ubuntu or other Linux distro in your FHCs? Any success stories out there? I notice our church CTO is a former Microsoftie. (I grew up around Redmond, nice place, horrible business policies.) I imagine our lab will probably be sticking with XP for as long as they can. I am considering proposing a small station of 4 Ubuntu desktops as a trial.They would be screaming fast compared to the others.
5. It looks like the church is recommending that FHCs purchase screens 1440x900 res which gives people more space on screen, but wow is it hard to convince people to try new things. Any tips for helping a lab improve painlessly?
We have the funds to revamp the entire lab, but the end of the year is our deadline. I'm not sure how we're going to transition the entire lab, ~50 WindowsXP desktops in a few months.
Thanks for any tips you might be able to give,
--Cathy Malmrose, Linux hardware builder & now IT Specialist for the east bay region in northern California
www.zareason.com
Brian Hawkins
Brian
Joel Finlinson
Joel Finlinson
DTS Tech Support
DTS Help Desk: 800 678-3440
Russell Hltn
Ghost is fine, just keep in mind that you need to do thing to prevent
LANDesk from getting confused if it's part of your image.
Russell Hltn
On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 9:38 AM, ZaReason <zare...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 1. Have any of you used Ghost (basic clone)? We're about to move over the
> Oakland, CA Family History Center & it would be good if we started with the
> best cloning tool available.
>
No experience except with Ghost. But keep in mind that when you image
a machine, you need to re-name it and create a new SID before throwing
it on a network with it's clones. Also there's a registry in LANDesk
that needs to be re-set so it sees it as a new machine. Otherwise,
SLC won't have an accurate inventory of your center.
> 2. Does this list contain any admins for Family History Centers? I just was
> called & I'm building my resource list. Any great resources I should know
> about?
I'm a Stake Technology Specialist, aka Assistant Stake Clerk over
computers. That includes Ward and Stake computers as well as the FHC.
On the FHC side, you should know about the yahoo groups FHCTECH and
LDSFHCTECH. I think the former has more members, but you'll find some
church support people on the second one. There's also FHCNET, but
it's directed more at directors but it frequently gets into computer
topics as directors try to fill in for non-functioning computer
people.
> 3. Does the church's CTO also cover genealogy centers? Who is the head
> bigwig for FHCs? If not Joel Dehlin, does s/he put out information in any
> format?
>
FHCs are actually a wholly-own subsidiary of the church with it's own
IT group. So as a STS, you are serving two masters. I don't know the
names for the FHC-side of things. Only for the FamilySearch web site
stuff.
> 4. Have any of you successfully loaded Ubuntu or other Linux distro in your
> FHCs? Any success stories out there? I notice our church CTO is a former
> Microsoftie. (I grew up around Redmond, nice place, horrible business
> policies.) I imagine our lab will probably be sticking with XP for as long
> as they can. I am considering proposing a small station of 4 Ubuntu desktops
> as a trial.They would be screaming fast compared to the others.
>
I've heard of some centers using Linux for file servers. Although I
know of one guy who said he wouldn't do it again - just so as to be
nice to the next guy with his calling.
I can certainly see an advantage to Linux for a file server as the
Windows Professional tops out at 10 clients and Windows Server is
kinda pricey.
> 5. It looks like the church is recommending that FHCs purchase screens
> 1440x900 res which gives people more space on screen, but wow is it hard to
> convince people to try new things. Any tips for helping a lab improve
> painlessly?
>
I'd introduce the higher res when you install bigger screens. I
suspect the patrons are not complaining about the res, but the fact
that higher res makes all the printing smaller - and their eyes are
not as good as a 20 or 30 year old's.
Someone was niceto us and donated some 21" CRTs.
Lars Rasmussen
only save partitions. I'm referring to a scenario where the disk
image files are saved to another location(external media or network
share) for later deployment.
This is one of the reasons I keep coming back to Ghost(I used to use
Drive Image by PowerQuest).
I've been able to save images of NTFS partitions using partimage, but
it required using dd to backup & later restore the MBR on the target
machine(this was in 2006 or 2007).
partimage in my experience has also been significantly slower than
ghost when writing an image to a target machine. Perhaps this has
since been mitigated with subsequent versions of ntfs-3g and
partimage, but booting to an NTFS native environment such as WinPE(try
WinBuilder from winbuilder.net ) and using Ghost seems much faster.
--
Lars Rasmussen
larsrasmussen.blogspot.com
On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 1:38 PM, ZaReason <zare...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 1. Have any of you used Ghost (basic clone)? We're about to move over the
> Oakland, CA Family History Center & it would be good if we started with the
> best cloning tool available.
[snip]