[Jayce]

I don't know if anybody has ever tinkered with Clonezilla, but we're about to get 500 new computers in within 6 weeks and it's making me nervous, since we simply have a 5 HDD cloner which takes up to an hour per 5 hard drives to clone.

I started to look at Clonezilla for my own personal sake for doing backups at home, until Clonezilla Server caught my eye. There's several things I can't iron out, though... and I'm hoping people here can answer my questions.

1 - Clonezilla Server required 2 ethernet cards, and/or 1 physical and 1 virtual card. I have a spare HP computer (1gb RAM P4 3.0ghz 80gb SATA HDD) that I plan to use as my Server for this little project. I have plenty of PCI NIC's so I'm squared away there. But what in essence is required for this? Say I wanted to connect a 16 port 10/100 Dell switch so I can image a dozen computers in one shot. How is this physically hooked up? I need 2 NIC's in the Server. Okay. Great. WHERE do they get plugged in, exactly? Why two? I never heard an explanation of why I would need two NIC's.

2 - Clonezilla Server also supports PXE boot. Is PXE something all computers support? Like isn't PXE simply burned to a CD which gives computers WITHOUT built in network boot capabilities the ability to network boot off of the CD? Reason I ask is, we have several old computers... so in the case of me having to image one, I'm curious if PXE booting off of a CD would enable a much older computer to connect to the Server to be cloned.

3 - I plan to try and set up a DRBL server later on the mentioned HP computer, but while I'm stuck at work waiting, I figured I'd ask here. Clonezilla Server offers some sort of a GUI. Okay, great. But to get it started, is it listed in Ubuntu as a program itself? Or do I have to run specific commands to get it running? Think of it like Samba. Samba isn't an "application" but when it's installed, it responds to certain commands in the terminal. Is that how Clonezilla Server is? Do I have to rely on the terminal to get it going? Or is there a GUI with enough options to do what I need?

4 - Lastly, anybody who is experienced with this stuff (DRBL Servers, Clonezilla, etc) is there anything else I "should" know about this before I set it up? I have a tutorial which explains how to set up a Clonezilla Server, but no where does it say how I physically hook anything up, which is why I'm asking here now.

[Jayce]

I'll worry about the server portion later, but meanwhile I have an additional question. This time it's about CloneZilla Live, not CloneZilla Server.

Question is this. Over the course of a few months, sometimes hard drives die at work. Sometimes we don't have the exact same sized replacement available... so some computers that originally came with 80gb hard drives now have 40gb hard drives. In reality, it doesn't matter because we have a couple terabytes of storage space that everybody's documents are saved on, so very little is saved on the local computer besides the OS, Office, Programs, etc...

Anyway, using CloneZilla Live CD, is there any way to create an image that isn't partition sized dependent? Meaning... is there a way I can create an image on a computer with an 80gb hard drive, and using CloneZilla Live CD, is there a way I can push that image (which only takes up 2gb of space, but originally sat on an 80gb hard drive) and push it to a computer with the EXACT same hardware, except this other computer has a 40gb hard drive??

I know I can use GParted to adjust the partition sizes accordingly, which isn't a big deal. But if I can bypass this step, I can be a lot quicker at my job. So if there's a way to just transfer the USED bytes on a hard drive as an image, that'd be great!