Regarding the cloning of physical systems, a while back Andrew Brown contributed a live image that would clone (a bit slowly) a physical system using cobbler to network deploy the clone image. I think it might be interesting to try to resurrect and supercharge that idea. This way we could be sure to deploy Windows systems that /also/ had their software installed, without having to also teach Cobbler about Windows domain automation. We say Clonezilla and other analogs is hard to deploy, why not write a better solution?
We're in the process of getting clonezilla up & running. We've added it to cobbler as a distro, without any real issues, and are actually intending to use to for RHEL based systems, vs windows. We have a few Oracle RAC servers, and they're all identical to each other except for the host name, and a few settings that the DBA's need to adjust. It'll be much faster than using a kickstart to build the system, in our case.
We also made the Windows team in the office (vs the datacenter) happy, by allowing them to use the pxe to pull up clonezilla. They can reimage a machine without even moving it.
I'm not sure of what the issue was with clonezilla in the past, but it seems pretty straight forward to us.
Having said that - it *really* doesn't like booting with the fiber cards we have on our hardware, so.. i'll be looking into the live image for cloning. Maybe that works :-)
Matthew
------------------ Matthew Barr InteractiveOne - Senior System Engineer e:mbarr@interactiveone.com