Ubuntu Domain Server

[John Moser]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 11:59 AM, Chan Chung Hang Christopher
<christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk> wrote:
> Shentino wrote:
>> My first impression is that it's something to look into.
>>
>
> Disk images? Give me a break. Disk images (a feature that Windows Server
> does not have) will make this the laughing stock of the IT world. There
> is a reason by Windows Server offers automatic remote installation of
> workstations and not creation of disk images. It is completely
> impractical and impossible if you include all the various software that
> may need installing on the workstation. Even I do not ghost the hundreds

... what?

When I went to school, they had Altris, which would routinely blast
out disk images (yes, from Norton Ghost) to a list of desktops that
were malfunctioning.  Each type of class had its own installation
(programming class, library, networking class, general IT study class
that would have to have ALL the software from Word to Visual C++), so
there were about a dozen disk images.

Every corporate environment I've been in has had GP Desktop, GP
Laptop, and then departmentalized images.  Phone support had their own
stuff, etc; but if you were i.e. IT or a general consultant or
something where you may need some software but not other software and
whatnot, you got an image that had the basics on it.  Visual Studio
licenses are expensive, so people got Microsoft Office and then if
they did C# development they got that part installed and if they did
VB.NET dev they got that part installed, and if they needed Access (a
$50 upgrade probably; for individuals it's a $300 upgrade) they got
that, after filing for approval.

There's a lot of "we need to install a base OS with our Anti-virus,
system management, and custom software all installed, with Microsoft
Office already" going on out there, with IT basically loading a base
image with all the "usual" software installed and then locally
installing or remotely pushing/publishing the rest.  Hell, there's
even the push/publish thing in Active Directory, where you lay out
that users in $OU get $SOFTWARE and when they log on it's made
available to them, and when they click the icon on the desktop it
automagically installs for you.

So, stripped base image, custom software, categorized USERS,
everything handled on-the-fly.