Creating CLIENT boot CD's for recovery

[mcswgn]

I've searched the Dantz Knowledge base, and some of this forum, and I've been surprised to find no discussion of creating boot CD's for the purpose of restoring CLIENTS. The manual proceedure of first reinstalling the OS is painful to say the least. (For MacOS X it requires installing the *exact* *same* *one*, up to minor version number!! How are you supposed to know what that was after the client is trashed??)

 

I have now created client boot CD's for MacOS 9 and MacOS X. I do not yet have one for Windows. These are CD's that will boot the client to the specified OS, with networking turned on (DHCP), and a working, already logged in Retrospect client. Each CD also has my favorite disk utilities installed.

 

The idea is that if a client has disk trouble, I can boot off the CD, try to diagnose/repare the disk with the disk utilities, and, if unsuccessful, reformat the disk and then restore from the Retrospect server *without* first reinstalling the OS by using the client on the CD. I didn't want to create a unique CD for each machine, so I had to use up an available license for each client CD. I named the clients "MacOS 9 SOS" and "MacOS X SOS" (which, of course, are not normally visible on the network) and I can just select the appropriate one as the destination of my restore.

 

My question is, what do others do for restoring clients? This same procedure could be done with an external hard disk (if you could get one that would actually hook up to every client in your system), but CDs seem cheaper and more portable. (Although, I have to admit that boot up speed is very _s_l_o_w_. The only one I've actually timed was 7-8 min for an 800MHz iMac! I don't know if it affects actual restore times as I don't have anything to compare against. If I have to do a restore, it's painfull enough to do it once. I don't have any desire to try it again by another method to see if it was any faster!)

 

If there is any desire, I'm happy to supply details on how the CDs were created, and since I know next to nothing about Windows (and actually prefer it that way), if anyone has suggestions about how the same might be done there I would like to hear it. (The problem with windows is that the only info I have been able to find on creating windows boot CDs seem to be for booting into DOS and you need something that will be able to read the different file systems, like NTFS, as well as run the client.)

 

==>Suggestion to Dantz<==

This is something that should come standard with any version of Retrospect that supports clients, and it shouldn't be necessary to use up a license to do it. The Retrospect server should be built with an ability to read a special client ID. This would be an ID that would identify a client as a *restore* *only* client. It could not be used to backup a machine, but could be used to restore a snapshot of some other logged in client. This would allow a generic restore client to be placed on boot CDs that would work with anyone's backup system. The client code would need to be modified so that instead of reading password info off the CD (which would create a huge security hole, since all restore clients would then have the same password), it would ask for a password on startup and then keep it in RAM. This password would be used to login the client. On the server the client would be treated in a special way. It would be browsable on the network, but that's it. It wouldn't get added to any groups or scripts and it would automatically be forgotten as soon as it wasn't visible on the network.

 

Alternatively, a boot CD creator could be provided that would install (on a disk image) an already configured client, customized to an individual setup. However, it's nicer to think of doing it in some sort of generic way. Maybe that's not possible with Windows machines, though.