I haz a Goost (again)

More than a year ago, I set out on a Project at the Empire:  to create a server that would store drive images of all the systems in the Auric hardware lab.  The systems are checked out regularly for use by Auric techs and escalations managers, both of which groups need them to try to re-create and reproduce customers’ reported issues.  The point of my project was to make it possible for the lab managers to restore each system’s original software image once that system came back home, and to have a known, fixed starting point for a tech when he began to work on a system.

The project took me a bit more than a year to complete, working in hours stolen from other things (lunches worked through, time stayed after off the clock, multi-tasking).  In October I called final completion to the field work, and started trying to write up the project to get my first internal Business Process Improvement certification (Empire jargon:  “BPI yellow belt”), with some advice from Red Tanya.  This part hasn’t gone along very far because in my current job, stealing time to write is much harder than it was to steal time to work on systems.

Even without the documentation, though, the lab managers were happily using the Ghost server (named from the software imaging product we use, Norton Ghost) to reimage systems every day.  And everything was fine, until our departmental equipment manager managed to scrounge a larger and more powerful server for the lab’s use.  And this meant everything on the server had to be migrated, and I was the only one available with the knowledge to do it.

All of this doing around coincided with a huge upsurge in my regular workload, and for weeks I couldn’t find time to see about the server ’cos the time wasn’t there.  One day I tried just physically migrating the drives where the images live into the new server, but Ghost couldn’t find them.

So there things sat until today, a quiet day when my regular workload was completely caught up for the first time in MONTHS, and I declared this to be Ghost Server Migration Day.  I rummaged around in the Symantec online knowledge base and found the articles that told how you really went about migrating Ghost from one machine to another, and dove in.

It wasn’t straightforward, but it’s rare anything is, when you do it the first time—and this was my first time.  Eventually, after a lot of flailing around with drive controllers and too-short cabling, and some bad language for good measure, I got all the drives back into the original server and started following the directions I had.

This part, once I followed the directions and had Ghost’s database backed up, went very smoothly.  I moved over the drives, moved over the extra cards (the SAS controller and a secondary NIC), connected everything, started the new server, and ran the restore routine.  And as soon as that was through—hey, here’s Norton finding my database of two-hundred-and-some systems!  And it can see where the images are stored!  And everything is associating correctly!

So the Shanghai Ghost server is once more live.  I’m still not completely out of the woods, ’cos I haven’t yet written the batch file to copy the new server’s public encryption key onto each of the clients, but that’s a relatively small part.  The heavy lifting is done, and there’s a Ghost (server) in Shanghai again.

Strawberry apricot pie.  Fnord.