15 computers overnight: hard disks instead of Norton Ghost

Before a new semester at Progmeistars we had to set up one computer with all the teachers’ software and clone it onto 15 machines.

Norton Ghost over the 100 Mbit network was too slow for 15 parallel copies. I was the Linux admin and the other admin did Windows, and I suggested putting the disks in physically: boot from one, write to the other, about half an hour per batch.

We mixed something up, and in the end we worked the whole weekend and all night. At 9 a.m., an hour before the first lesson of the new semester, Sergey Ilyich Melnik found us still swapping disks. “Guys, have you gone mad?” I said it was all calculated and the last batch would be done in half an hour.

It all worked.

What I took from it: when the network hits its ceiling, carrying disks by hand can be faster, but the plan needs time for mistakes.