Clonezilla on Edubuntu thin terminal server?

[Hendrik Boshoff]

I may be getting replacement for 40  thin terminals at a primary school Edubuntu lab.

These machines should be capable of running an OS on their own, so I want to setup one and clone it to the rest. I also want to be able to refresh the images with multicast every night. This configuration will relieve the reliability bottleneck of server and network during class, but lose the single installation advantage of a terminal server. I am thinking of having the local boot option as a backup for thin terminal ability.

Now I see that Clonezilla (www.clonezilla.org) has features comparable to Norton Ghost Corporate Ed. It is based on DRBL (Diskless remote boot in Linux), which seems to me to overlap at least the "lower" levels of LTSP significantly.

Is it possible / desirable to run Clonezilla in multicasting mode on an Edubuntu thin terminal server without installing DRBL? What do I need to change?

An alternative would be setting up a dedicated server for Clonezilla. Space is at a premium, so I prefer not to do this.

Has anyone used Clonezilla?

Regards

Hendrik Boshoff
hendrikb at webafrica.org.za