Imaging with Ghost
The University of Findlay's College of Education

Imaging Over a LAN

A convenient way to distribute image files is over a Local Area Network (LAN). If all of your computers are equipped with network interface cards (NICs), you will probably find that doing imaging over the LAN is easy and worth while.

Before you get started with creating images, make sure things are setup correctly on your server. Create a resource on your server where the image files can be stored. Copy the image client software to this resource, so it can be run over the LAN. Create two accounts that have access to this resource. The first account needs WRITE access (to create images) and the second account needs READ access (to use stored images).

Create a LAN boot disk. Boot a model machine from this disk, and connect to server resource. Create a "master" image on the server. This image can be used by any machine that can connect to the server. Once the image is on the server, use the same boot disk to boot from a machine that needs to be imaged.

Here are some things to consideration when imaging over the LAN.

  1. It will be easier to create the boot disks if you have a DHCP server on your network. Otherwise, unique IP number information will have to be included with each boot disk.
  2. If you want to image two machines at the same time, each machine will need a unique boot disk. The boot disks have a "computer name" associated with the disk, and each of these names must be unique on the network.
  3. Each time a new image process is started on the network, more bandwidth is required. If two machines are using standard LAN boot disks to load the same image, each machine will use the full bandwidth to get its copy of the image. If an image is 1000 MB, the full 1000 MB will be copied over the network each time a new machine grabs the image. Imaging ten machines with this process will use 10X1000 MB (or 10 GB) of total bandwidth. If you wish to save bandwidth doing multiply machines with the same image, see Multi-Casting.
  4. The speed of the imaging process is dependent on the network speed. The process will take ten times as long on a 10 Mb network as compared with a 100 Mb connection.
  5. If your network is not switched, one image will consume all available bandwidth for all network users. Try to do imaging during off hours.