Sunday, June 21, 2009

Clonezilla - Linux and Windows imaging

In VMware, Palo Alto, we evaluated Clonezilla for Imaging different Linux distributions like openSUSE, SLED, Ubuntu, RHEL, Fedora, Madriva. Some success stories:

Took Ubuntu image on DELL 390 Intel single processor, first hard disk and restored it in HP AMD Athlon Dual processor, second hard disk using Clonezilla Live CD and worked awesome ! The restore times took approx 2 minutes 12 seconds. The system is usable now ! wow !! I didn't expect this to work, to be frank :) This is with regular partition.

Also, tried with Fedora LVM image, with different hard disk size, this failed, I assume this is due to LVM, though I'm not sure.

Next tried creating Windows XP SP2 32bit image from DELL 390 and deployed it on DELL 3400 based on the info available here and here and it worked amazingly !

Great work Clonezilla team

Friday, June 12, 2009

Clonezilla imaging solution - Better than Altiris imaging solution

Today at work I tried creating an Ubuntu image from DELL 390 and restored the image on DELL 3400 using Clonezilla Live CD and everything worked seamlessly !

In our Desktop (Workstation) team setup, we have our NFS server hosted, just pointed this server to the Clonezilla Live CD for saving and restoring the image. NFS Server located in first floor of the building and the test machine is on the same building, second floor.

Some interesting points:

Tried Ubuntu image with 2.1 GB of data with two partitions (/dev/sda1 - ext3, actual partition size 153 GB and /dev/sda5 is swap of 6 GB)

* Saving this image took 2 minutes 15 seconds to store on the NFS Server (DELL 390)

* Restoring this image took 2 minutes 10 seconds from the NFS Server (DELL 3400)

Well, if you want to setup Clonezilla you need to have:

* NFS Server or SSH Server or another local hard disk (Read more on Clonezilla web site)

* Clonezilla live CD

I’m amazed by the performance ! and you ? ;-)

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Mago – A Desktop Testing Initiative

A project announcement from Ara Pulido today. Automated testing for GNOME and KDE (as soon as AT-SPI gets migrated to D-BUS) using LDTP !!!

More info here. Congratulations to the team, good work.