Month: June 2010

What do Michael Jordan, Thomas Edison, Walt Disney, Abraham Lincoln, Lucille Ball, Ulysses S. Grant, and The Beatles have in common?

Tech Star Lyrics

I’m through with standing in line for a bullshit promotion,
Working for a luddite who ain’t got a notion.
This career hasn’t turned out quite the way I want it to be.

(So tell me what you want?)

I want to join a start-up in the digital space,
And build a rock star business just like Steve Case,
Or better Sergey and Larry or Mark or Evan Jack and Biz.

(So what you need?)

I need some VC funding from a quality firm,
Have to watch the dilution and the other terms,
Don’t want to give away too much precious equity.

(Been there, done that.)

I want to build a business with lots of scale,
That levereges real time / local / long tail,
Then sell it for $100 mil seems fine to me.

(So how you gonna do it?)

We’ll build an iPhone app, distribute it for free,
Then monetize with ads that target to a tee.

‘Cause we all just want to be big tech stars,
Second time entrepreneurs with exits and scars.
The backing comes easy and the money comes cheap,
We’ll sell it before we get in too deep.
And I’ll tweet my drivel like a digital player,
And check in everywhere so I can be Mayor.
Spend all my time on conference panels,
Which will all be covered in the digital annals.
Hey, hey, I wanna be a tech star.
Hey, hey, I wanna be a tech star.

Now digital innovation’s back in spades,
The traditional players are digging their graves.
They claim pay walls will be their savior.

(But you can’t change ingrained consumer behavior.)

We’ll use cloud computing and open source,
And Facebook for free distribution of course.
Gonna do it all without a need for a series B.

(So how you gonna do it?)

We’ll build an iPhone app, distribute it for free,
Then monetize with ads that target to a tee.

‘Cause we all just want to be big tech stars,
Second time entrepreneurs with exits and scars.
The backing comes easy and the money comes cheap,
We’ll sell it before we get in too deep.
And I’ll tweet my drivel like a digital player,
And check in everywhere so I can be Mayor.
Spend all my time on conference panels,
Which will all be covered in the digital annals.

And the markets and deals are back for sure,
Thank God the doomsday call was premature.
The big companies are chock full of cash,
And all I’m lookin’ for is my own little stash, well. . .

Hey, hey, I wanna be a tech star.

I’ll hire the staffers and the engineers,
And pay them with options, pizza and beers.
I’ll get laid off bankers to do all my deals,
Maybe a smoking hot salesperson in high heels.

‘Cause we all just want to be big tech stars,
Second time entrepreneurs with exits and scars.
The backing comes easy and the money comes cheap,
We’ll sell it before we get in too deep.
And I’ll tweet my drivel like a digital player,
And check in everywhere so I can be Mayor.
Spend all my time on conference panels,
Which will all be covered in the digital annals.

And to ensure we get a sky-high price,
We’ll hire the best bank to give is advice.
Getting the right team is very worthwhile,
Everybody should have these guys on speed dial.

Hey, hey, I wanna be a tech star.
Hey, hey, I wanna be a tech star.

You’re probably familiar with the popular proprietary commercial package Norton Ghost®. The problem with these kind of software packages is that it takes a lot of time to massively clone systems to many computers. You’ve probably also heard of Symantec’s solution to this problem, Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition® with multicasting. Well, now there is an OpenSource clone system (OCS) solution called Clonezilla with unicasting and multicasting!

Clonezilla, based on DRBL, Partclone and udpcast, allows you to do bare metal backup and recovery. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla SE (server edition). Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. While Clonezilla SE is for massive deployment, it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the harddisk. This increases the clone efficiency. At the NCHC’s Classroom C, Clonezilla SE was used to clone 41 computers simultaneously. It took only about 10 minutes to clone a 5.6 GBytes system image to all 41 computers via multicasting!

Features of Clonezilla

• Free (GPL) Software.
• Filesystem supported: (1) ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, (2) FAT, NTFS of MS Windows, (3) HFS+ of Mac OS, (4) UFS of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, and (5) VMFS of VMWare ESX. Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux, MS windows, Intel-based Mac OS, and FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, no matter it’s 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x86-64) OS. For these file systems, only used blocks in partition are saved and restored. For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd in Clonezilla.
• LVM2 (LVM version 1 is not) under GNU/Linux is supported.
• Grub (version 1 and version 2) is supported.
• Multicast is supported in Clonezilla SE, which is suitable for massively clone. You can also remotely use it to save or restore a bunch of computers if PXE and Wake-on-LAN are supported in your clients.
• Based on Partclone (default), Partimage (optional), ntfsclone (optional), or dd to image or clone a partition. However, Clonezilla, containing some other programs, can save and restore not only partitions, but also a whole disk.
• By using another free software drbl-winroll, which is also developed by us, the hostname, group, and SID of cloned MS windows machine can be automatically changed.

Back in ’93 I found a great little utility called Ghost, which could quickly and easily clone DOS or Windows (3.1, 95, NT) computers.  I used to teach week-long IT training classes and had to set a dozen or so computers back to default settings in order for each class to start fresh.  Ghost.exe was awesome & did the job easily and quickly.  I wish I could remember the name of the developer – he was a nice fellow from down under, New Zealand if I remember correctly. I spoke with him a few times about using Ghost & gave him some feedback from my perspective.  I used it for several years and it was great!

Then along came Symantec who bought Ghost (I think Norton actually bought Ghost, then Symantec bought them).  No matter.  They screwed it up royally.  Just like they do with about everything they buy.  Oh, they don’t have the corner on screwing things up – Microsoft, CA and myriad others do the same thing.

Anyway, Clonezilla is a fresh new product that gets back to the basics of cloning.  Here’s a little from the Clonezilla site:

Clonezilla, based on DRBL, Partclone and udpcast, allows you to do bare metal backup and recovery. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla SE (server edition). Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. While Clonezilla SE is for massive deployment, it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the harddisk. This increases the clone efficiency. At the NCHC’s Classroom C, Clonezilla SE was used to clone 41 computers simultaneously. It took only about 10 minutes to clone a 5.6 GBytes system image to all 41 computers via multicasting!

Features of Clonezilla

• Free (GPL) Software.
• Filesystem supported: (1) ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, (2) FAT, NTFS of MS Windows, (3) HFS+ of Mac OS, (4) UFS of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, and (5) VMFS of VMWare ESX. Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux, MS windows, Intel-based Mac OS, and FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, no matter it’s 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x86-64) OS. For these file systems, only used blocks in partition are saved and restored. For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd in Clonezilla.
• LVM2 (LVM version 1 is not) under GNU/Linux is supported.
• Grub (version 1 and version 2) is supported.
• Multicast is supported in Clonezilla SE, which is suitable for massively clone. You can also remotely use it to save or restore a bunch of computers if PXE and Wake-on-LAN are supported in your clients.
• Based on Partclone (default), Partimage (optional), ntfsclone (optional), or dd to image or clone a partition. However, Clonezilla, containing some other programs, can save and restore not only partitions, but also a whole disk.
• By using another free software drbl-winroll, which is also developed by us, the hostname, group, and SID of cloned MS windows machine can be automatically changed. 

Swiss File Knife is a free multi function command line tool that belongs onto every USB stick. SFK can be downloaded from sourceforge. this package contains binaries, source and buildscripts for Windows and Linux. You may also download just the Windows executable sfk.exe or the Linux binary for Ubuntu or DSL. No installation, no registry entries, no DLL’s – one exe handles all.