Anyone using Zen Imaging....this is for you

[lerdalt]

Maybe I'm behind the times, but no matter what, this needs to be shared. Type the following in at the bash# prompt before you start the imaging session
hdparm -d1 /dev/hda
It will switch the disk to DMA mode. We have been cutting imaging times almost in half.

Add this at the end of the settings.txt file and it will be automatic if you are doing remote imaging. Or add it into the scripts for using scripted imaging.

You have to see it to believe it.

 

[ITsmyfault]

See this coolsolution for getting it to work with PXE:

http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/zenworks/features/trenches/tr_imaging_hdparm_zw.html

See this article to learn more about hdparm:

http://linux.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/272

..and you're absolutely correct.. you can cut imaging times by a *ton*.
What we did here was take some sample hardware, boot from the imaging floppies (to get into the linux imaging environment) and then try and test a variety of hdparm settings until we found ones that worked well on our boxes. Then I edited the linux.2 file so that those settings would be the default for pxe sessions.

Also, disabling compression (if it's on) is a huge timesaver. We can bring down a Win2k base image in well under 3min. (network is 100Mb switched) You can kill compression on the command line if you're going from disk, or in C1 for PXE. Hard disks are cheap, and time is $, so why compress?

 

[Visitor]

We've also just implemented ZEN imaging and are very pleased with the results. A quick question: is there any way to 'hide' a PC's diagnostic partition that gets set to the D: drive after ZEN/PXE imaging?