8 èmes rencontres internationales du logiciel libre

 Intervenants : Steven Shiau, Chen-Kai Sun, Yao-Tsug Wang and Yu-Chin Tsai
 Date/horaire : Jeudi 12 à 9h30, début de la conférence ; 9h30 à 10h suite en vidéoconférence avec Taiwan
 Traduction : une traduction Anglais-Français est assurée sur place.

National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC), Taiwan

You’re probably familiar with the popular proprietary commercial package Norton Ghost® and its Open Source counterpart, Partition Image. The problem with these software packages is that it takes them a long time to massively clone a system from one computer to many. Symantec offers a solution to this problem, Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition® with multicasting. Well, now there is an Open Source clone system (OCS) solution called Clonezilla with unicasting and multicasting ! Clonezilla has been used at 300+ Taiwanese primary and high schools.

In this discussion, we will introduce Clonezilla, describe its features, and illustrate how it can be used to do a bare-metal restore or, using a real-life scenario from one of Taiwan’s primary schools as an example, for disaster recovery. Also, we will discuss user feedback.

Clonezilla, based on Diskless Remote Boot in Linux (DRBL), Partition Image, ntfsclone, and udpcast, allows you to massively clone many computers (40 plus !) simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only the used blocks in the hard-disk if the file system is supported. This greatly increases Clonezilla’s efficiency. Clonezilla was used to clone 41 computers simultaneously at the NCHC’s Classroom C. It took about ten minutes to clone a 5.6 GBytes system image to all 41 computers via multicasting !

In order to use Clonezilla to clone many computers at once, a DRBL server must first be set up. On the other hand, you DO NOT have to install DRBL if you only want to clone a single machine. Clonezilla Live can be used in this situation. Clonezilla Live allows you to use a CD/DVD or USB flash drive to boot and run Clonezilla.

Clonezilla Features :
 Free (GPL-based) Software.
 Multicast is supported in PXEBoot Clonezilla. This works well when you want to massively clone a system from one computer to many. You can also use it remotely to save or restore a group of computers if PXE and Wake-on-LAN are supported by your client.
 Utilizes Partimage, ntfsclone and dd to clone partitions. Clonezilla contains other programs that can save and restore not only partitions but an entire disk as well.
 If the file system (e.g. ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs, fat, ntfs) is supported, only the used blocks of the hard-disk will be saved and restored. This greatly increases the cloning efficiency. For unsupported file systems, sector-to-sector copying is accomplished via dd which is also included Clonezilla.
 LVM2 under GNU/Linux is supported as well.
 By using the free software DRBL-winroll which was also developed by the NCHC’s free software lab, the hostname, group, and SID of a cloned MS windows machine can be automatically changed.
 Clonezilla is a single machine clone system that does not require installation, Clonezilla Live is also available.