I had to curb my Linux fun for a bit, or so I thought, to work on some summer tasks. The first thing I needed to do was get a framework for our imaging in place. Historically, we have used Ghost from back when Binary Labs owned a produced it. We never really got into multi casting for no particularly good reason. We continued to lean on the old Dos ODI based boot disks which ran on IPX. Some might remember the old lsl, 3c90x, ipxodi, vlm commands like they were yesterday. I do too, mostly because they were yesterday for us, literally.
We have had ZenWorks in place for a while. I even installed the Zen 7 imaging bits last summer but never got around to playing with it until recently. In the past week, I have finally been able to create boot CDs and USB thumb drives which boot to a menu driven shell script for all of our normal everyday tasks. I even tested multi casting and it seems to be working well. I think we’ve officially caught up to the year 2000 with our imaging.
I have all the server equipment ordered I need for the summer. It shaping up that our iSCSI cluster is a go. If anyone has any pro tips with Novell Cluster Services, feel free to drop me a line. You know, anything that I might want to avoid because a year down the road I might be convinced to try and build a time machine out of a Delorean so I can produce the necessary 1.21 gigawatts I need for time travel to come back and slap myself in the back of the head for the dumb decision I’m about to make…in the past…or something.
On an unrelated note, I was accused of being a Novell employee or a plant on a news site/message board this week. I’ve been called plenty of things in my life, that’s the first time I’ve been tagged as a corporate shill. Should I be honored? 
