Ghost Solution Suite

I am using Ghost Solution Suite to image a lab environment. It works fine for XP, 2003, NT. However, I randomly get errors when I restore images of Fedora Core 3 and Fedora Core 4. I found that it can't read the ext3 filesystem on FC4 so I have created those as ext2 which it apparently can read. After I do a restore on the ghost image, sometimes the machines will boot as dirty and force an fsck which finds an extreme amount of errors (bad blocks, etc). The original source machines work just fine and pass a fsck without any errors. I've also found that imaging those systems takes hours compared with 20 minutes for an XP of the same file system size.

On RedHat 7.2 and 9.0 it will sometimes have problems creating an image of the filesystem. It will error out with cryptic messages referencing issues of reading blocks and such.

Has anyone came across issues with Ghost supporting ext filesystems?

Hi Andrew,

What version of Ghost are you using? And are you also using LVMs in your Linux installation?

From your description I guess you are using GSS1.0. GSS 1.1 includes better support for the advanced filesystem features in later versions of Linux, so I would advise you to upgrade if you can.
If you need to use GSS1.0 make sure that the ext2/ext3 filesystems you create do not use resize inodes or ACLs.

I am using GSS1.0. I'll try to upgrade to GSS1.1.

Yes, some of the images are using LVM and some are not. Depends on the disk configuration.

One of the biggest issues I've seen is that the /boot partition doesn't image / restore correctly. I can image it seperately on a few systems and then restore it to others and it will work.

Andrew

I just did a quick test with GSS1.1 on fedora core 4 with Ext3 but no LVM. The imaging and restore works without any problems, so I can confirm that GSS1.1 should be fine :)

Using LVMs with GSS1.1 is not as straight forward as you can't restore them without doing some manual changes first, but it can still work with LVMs.

Good luck :)

Do I need to purchase an upgrade to GSS1.1 or is there one for download somewhere? I looked on the site and the download updates for GSS is greyed out.

Thanks,
Andrew

GSS1.1 is available for free if you have purchased maintenance (an uprgade letter would have been sent to you when GSS 1.1 was released), otherwise you need to purchase the new version as an upgrade.