g4u

g4u is a hard disk imaging software package. It operates much like Ghost, with the following advantages:

• It's open-source (free!)
• Better out-of-box support for unusual ethernet and disk drivers (NetBSD 2.0 based).
• Uses FTP for data transmission, instead of a proprietary format.
• Uses a standardized image format (raw) that can be mounted on different operating systems without additional software. It's also the standard for incident forensics.
• It always stores the raw disk data. This includes deleted files.

g4u has the following disadvantages over Ghost, however:

• It always stores the raw disk data. This means large images unless you fill the deleted space with zero's (see the g4u for instructions).
• Not menu-driven, which isn't as bad as it sounds. It is a bit annoying if you don't use DHCP, however.
• The interface does not allow you to immediately browse a list of images that are available. You can however use the ftp command to check.
• Because g4u uses raw disk images, it will not resize the filesystem to fit different sized hard disks.

We store our g4u images on ftp.chem.indiana.edu (129.79.136.75), under the username "install". The standard filename format we use is hostname-diskname. So, for the ion cluster, it's ion-wd0 and ion-wd1.

g4u examples

g4u boots up with a menu that shows example usage statements. I'll cover what we use here within Chemistry:

Seeing what disks are available

disks

Creating an image

uploaddisk 129.79.136.75 ion-wd0 wd0

129.79.136.75 is the IP our FTP server is at

ion-wd0 is the name of this new image

wd0 is the name of the disk the image is being created from

Downloading an image

slurpdisk 129.79.136.75 ion-wd1 wd1

Manually setting network preferences

Since we have a DHCP server that gives bogus entries by default, we will need to kill the DHCP client, and remove the route.

kill `cat /var/run/dhclient.pid`
route delete default

Then we can give new settings to it:

ifconfig bge0 129.79.136.4 netmask 255.255.255.0
route add default 129.79.136.254