NVMUG eNews 7/17/2004

Last updated 7/22/2004

Gonter Discusses Computer Cloning

After about an hour of questions, answers, and general discussion, Geof Gonter described how his company uses computer cloning to maintain school compuers. He also reported on MacWorld in Boston. It was nice to see so many people at the meeting on a beautiful July Saturday.

In this NVMUG eNews

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Gonter Discusses Computer Cloning - Caledonian-Record

Geof Gonter answers questions about cloning at the Northern Vermont Macintosh User Group meeting in St. Johnsbury, Saturday.

Gonter Discusses Computer Cloning

As reported by Hartley Jim Jackson in the Caledonian-Record with corrections to the schools served added later.

Geof Gonter told the Northern Vermont Macintosh User Group how they use cloning to setup, backup and maintain school computers at the NVMUG meeting in St. Johnsbury , Saturday. Then he described his experiences at MacWorld in Boston.

Gonter works for a company, Wild Branch Solutions in Orleans, that maintains computers ll but tow the public schools in the Orleans North Essex Supervisory Union, All schools in the Orleans Central SU, OSSU (except Hazen Union HS, Miller's Run School, and Twinfield Union. Some of these schools use only Windows machines, some only Macintosh, but most use a mix.

Within a school the computers used by the students are generally setup the same with their administrator accounts, teacher accounts, and student accounts. When the signs out an iBook the the teacher account is deleted.

The student does not always work on the same computer. One time the student may get iBook number 14 from the rack, the next time iBook 17.

If the computer the student used last time in the lab is busy, the student goes to another computer instead of waiting. The students are all supposed to save their work on a central server, so that they can work on it from any computer.

The server is a powerful computer with an unbelievably large amount of storage. It is built to network with other school or business computers. All of the servers in the schools Gonter serves are Macintosh except for four Windows servers. Macintosh servers work with computers with Windows, Macintosh, and Linux operating systems.

The children's work is kept on the server in folders defined by the year they graduate. Kids learn the importance of quitting applications when they are done, and of saving their work to the server.

The Glover and Irasburg schools have a grant that will provide Macintosh iBooks for the sixth graders for the next three years. All these iBooks will have to be set up the same, be updated the same, and periodically be restored so that they all remain identical after students have been using them.

Gonter's company has standardized on Carbon Copy Cloner to backup and maintain these machines because it does what they need to do, it is reasonably fast, and it is free so the school does not have to buy a copy for every machine.

If you try to copy instead of clone all the software from a computer to a hard drive, you run into permission problems which often involve invisible files. The files cannot be copied without the proper permissions. Gonter recommends using Disk Utilities to rebuild permissions before cloning or backing up, and at least once a month, but you still cannot copy all the files at once without cloning them.

In the iBook example, Gonter would first set up one iBook with the programs, the operating system, and the permissions and preferences all set the way the school wants them. Every copy made from this iBook will be the same because he will clone them.

He would plug an external hard drive into the iBook. The external hard drive would have Carbon Copy Cloner, Net Restore, and a Mac OS X operating system on it. The system has to be on the hard so you can boot with a hard drive and repair permissions on it. He uses a 160-gigabyte FireWire hard drive which is formatted into two 80-gig partitions. Only a FireWire drive to be used as a boot drive, and a FireWire drive is fast.

Carbon Copy Cloner has options to set when doing a clone. Gonter has not used the synchronization options which would synchronize instead of cloning files. He sets the option to make the clone bootable. When he wants to save an exact copy instead of replacing an existing system, he sets an option to create a disk image, or ,dmg, file. To replace a system he clicks the option to prepare for Apple Restore which is the same as preparing for Net Restore which he uses. You can select Read-only compression to save space, but at some cost in restoration time.

It takes about an hour and a half to clone everything from the iBook to the hard drive if you do not take the music files. Do not schedule cloning between 2 and 4 a.m. when Apple runs chrons which are scheduled maintenance programs.

Using Net Restore on a Mac OS X server, you can restore up to 25 computers at a time. In the dialog, you must click on "lock", then enter a password for the the unit for that machine, and click the items to be copied on the right hand side. Net Restore will not do a copy to those files which have changes more recent than the cloned files.

Gonter plugs the hard drive into the target Macintosh. He holds down the Option key when when starting the Macintosh which boots the hard drive. Then he chooses Carbon Copy Cloner and asks it to rewrite the Macintosh. It will reformat the target disk, then rewrite the clone.

(You may want to copy data to a hard drive before doing the restore.)

They do not have to do a verify when they restore.

Click and enter the password when you are ready to restore. it takes 18 to 20 minutes for an 8-gigabyte restore.

In summary, this process takes an image of an iBook. Puts the image on an external hard drive. Puts the same image on every iBook's hard drive.

It wipes off anything that was on the iBooks. So, all desktops will be identical. The student does not always get the same iBook but it always looks and works the same.

Maine's One-To-One iBook initiative has been successful, and has been especially effective when addressed special. One example was a Korean student who did not speak English. With the computer he could key in Korean words and see the English equivalent. Within seven months this seventh-grader was writing English themes.

Gonter reported that MacWorld without the presence of Apple and Adobe was small, maybe one fourth the size it would have been. However, he enjoyed it and the exhibitors who were there were happy with the sales they made. There were seminars you had to pay for, but there were also presentations by exhibitors on the main floor. Four guys who designed the original Macintosh case were there, one of them was from Burlington.

Geof said that Peachpit and Borders were there with all of their books. Geof bought two Peachpit books, iLife and Macintosh Help which he believes we should get for the club library.

A new member joined us, She did not know there were other Macintosh users around until she read about it in the Caledonian-Record.

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2. More About the Meeting

Stephen Farber passed out pens and notepads that he got for us from Apple.

Chip Troiano bought a used G3 iMac with 512 megs of RAM, a Miinolta scanner, and an Epson 2200 photo printer for the digital darkroom he is planning. The equipment is not set up yet. He has Mac OS X 10.2, and he was advised to upgrade it to 10.8. Several people said they thought jaguar would be faster than Panther for his use. I do not believe Panther is slower than jaguar was on my G3 iBook, but I don't know.

Stephen said that if you are updating from Mac OS X 10.2 to Mac OS X 10.8, do not do it all at once. Instead update to 10.6 and then to 10.8. Geof said that if you are running OS 9.1, be careful that you do not accidentally update to OS 9.2. These two systems work with different hardware configurations and if you accidentally change you may not be able to boot your computer.

Tom Cudahy took a dead G3 Pismo to the Bits & Bytes service department in Concord wondering if it would be worth fixing. They unplugged the PRAM battery and it started. Stephen Farber explained that the PRAM contains the power manager. Tom said all it needed was replacement of the PRAM battery and repairs to a cracked adaptor charger cord.

There was a lot of discussion about battery life on a laptop. Geof takes his battery out when he will be plugged in for a couple of days, and showed how easy it is to do. Some one said to run the battery all the way down until the laptop goes to sleep, then recharge it again at least once a month.

Stephen Farber e-mailed an URL where you can get the instructions directly from Apple for laptop and iPod batteries.

http://www.apple.com/batteries/

According to Apple, battery life refers to the time your powerbook, iBook, or iPod will run before it must be recharged. Lithium-ion batteries use a fast charge until about 80% recharged, then a trickle charge. An iPod takes about an hour to charge to 80% capacity, and another 2 to 3 hours to fully recharge if it is not being used.

You can recharge a lithium-ion battery whenever convenient without the full charge or discharge cycle necessary to keep Nickle-based batteries at peak performance.

Battery lifespan means the total amount of time your battery will last before it must be replaced. A charge cycle means using all of a battery's power, but that does not necessarily mean a single charge. Using 20% of your battery's power and recharging it five times is one charge cycle. Using 50% and recharging it twice is also one charge cycle.

Each time you complete a charge cycle it diminished battery capacity slightly. At the same time, lithium-ion batteries need to be used for maximum performance.

If you do not use your device often, be sure to complete a charge cycle at least once a month. (See definition of a charge cycle.) An ideal use would be commuter who uses her iBook on the train, then piugs it in at the office to charge.

Your battery likes to be at room temperature, between 50 and 95 degrees for a laptop and between 32 and 95 degrees for an iPod. Do not leave it locked in a hot trunk.

If you manage an iBook lab at a school that is not in session over the summer, Apple recommends that you remove and store the battery with a 50% charge, neither fully charged nor discharged.

An iBook or Powerbook battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity for 300 charge cycles, an iPod for 400 charge cycles.

And it is important to get the latest software update.

Back to the meeting: Geof Gonter said that Wintel machines require lots of security updates, most of them automatic, but one about every two weeks.

Tom Cudahy has some experience with using Silver Keeper free from LaCie for back ups to save to a small external hard drive. Maybe we should have him talk about it sometime.

Which reminds me that Geof's cloning of the operating system and programs is very unlike the home user's back up needs where the data is the most important thing to back up - addresses, records, documents, and of course pictures and music.

You do not need to install languages and printer drivers that you do not need at home. Use custom options when you install the system. A shareware delocalizer can be used to take languages out.

MacWorld was the first event at the new Boston convention center, so it was the largest ever held there. The convention center is a beautiful building and Geof said the food was reasonable, free wireless connection was available everywhere.

If your PowerBook is run over by a bus, and you have important data on it, contact Geof. He has signed up to e a finder with WildBranch, a data saver company, that has a recovery method. But the data must be important because the minimum charge for recovery is $1,000.

Geof bought iLife by Michael Rubin from Peachpit which Apple uses as a training textbook to become an Apple Pro. He also ordered mac OS X Help, another Peachpit book, and recommended that I get them for our library.

We added Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, Little Black Book which I had reviewed before, Mac OS X Illustrated and Mac OS X Secrets from Wiley publishers, and Digital Photograhy Hacks from O'Reilly.

Kids can generally choose whether they write their reports in AppleWorks or Microsoft Office. Some who are going to work on stuff at home do not have AppleWorks on the home computer. One school lab running Windows 95 on PCs has AppleWorks for word processing. There are rumors about AppleWorks 7 being more like Microsoft, but some question whether Apple would risk Microsoft's displeasure.

Safari works with 99% of the web sites pretty well. Using Tabs in Safari you can open up three or more folders at once, start reading the first one as soon as it is up, and when you tab to the others they will be already up. Some players on some music sites require Explorer or the won't work.

Geof says .mac is worth the cost to him to have a consistent e-mail account. It is also his iTunes purchasing account, and some on-line training is available, and Apple will send you stuff to your .mac account that they would not send otherwise. A .mac account does not replace the need for an Internet Service Provider.

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