Announcing PING Updates / Stable releases

[Ssin]

andrew

Restoring to a smaller partition works. Did that from 40GB to 20GB couples of times and on other bigger sized HDD's.

[Natan]

Hi people,

I'm glad to announce a new version of the beta 1.12, available here:
http://www.windowsdream.com/dl/PING_1.12/

Changes:

- Added support for HP SmartArray (/dev/cciss/c0d0 device)
Ex.: fdisk => Disk /dev/cciss/c0d0: 73.3 GB, 73372631040 bytes
Thanks, Codd.

- The restoration of a CD/DVD is now fully automatic (no question raised at all) if a file called 'AUTO' (case sensitive) is found at the root of the CD/DVD. You'd better advertise the 'feature' on your future DVDs

- mount.cifs is now used when mount.smbfs does not work. In some cases, this might bring more success (the point is related to the mounting of MS Shares in a Windows Server environment -- look for Arckane's related posts).
Thanks, Arckane.

As always, lots of tests will be necessary.

Wishing a good Easter / Passover 'hag hamo'ed to everyone.
Natan

[uruiamme]

Well, I tried the latest beta of PING, and I came up with a list of bugs, feature requests, and comments from a 1st time user.

#1, why reboot every time? A bit ridiculous, I will be "sort of" watching the screen every few minutes, and then a reboot occurs with no exact reason. I guess when PING does something, it reboots when done. Why not show what has been done, and let me either do something else from the menu or reboot of my own free will? It makes me assume that either things went well or they didn't.

#2, my hard drive was being replaced with another one, hence why I used PING. But when a bad sector was encountered (that was going to be read and re-read a few times) PING just gave up. Strangely enough, the first time it happened was on a backup in which partition #1 had bad sectors and 4 seconds into the backup, it switched over to backing up partition #2! I knew something was up, so I continued testing. After I saw this behavior more (sometimes it would get 5% or 50% of the drive backed up before switching to the D: drive) I understood the issue. I ran SpinRite 6.0 on the bad drive to repair it. Then, I booted to Windows and ran the drive manufacturer's fix program, which marked a lot of bad sectors for me. Then, back to PING which finally backed up the C: drive along with D: -- a long ordeal.

So bad sectors are a big stopper for PING. I guess if only one partition was involved, it would have rebooted (see #1) and I would have thought the backup was complete! Consider if 75% of the drive was backed up and I never knew this since PING would have rebooted and I would have had plenty of files on my network share.

#3 When doing a restore, I guess I can only restore to the first drive? There is no choice where to restore. So if I had backed up to a local drive and then wanted to restore to a local drive, isn't possible to accidentally restore to the wrong one? Especially since a reboot might have confused me?

#4, When I typed in a bad share password, I had to reboot. There was never a prompt to retype my password, just to retype the share folder. It would be nice if the program looped back to allow you to retype any and all erroneous stuff -- in case I typed a bad IP address or share name, too.

#5, I wonder if you could log data to the share folder? Or somewhere? I mean, the PING screen shows a lot of stuff, like partition sizes and stuff. Why not send this to a TXT file? I wrote my stuff down, and glad I did. This way, we can verify the size of partitions, fix any problems, whatever.

#6, the login was a bit odd to the commandline. Sometimes, it wanted me to type root, sometimes not. One odd time, I got a commandline with ALL CAPS FOR EVERYTHING. I HAVEN'T SEEN THAT FOR A NUMBER OF YEARS. IT WAS LIKE YELLING AT MYSELF OR THE COMPUTER. But other times, the login was more normal. Since I have never used Linux, I really didn't know what all to do with the power. If I knew how to see partitions or format a drive, I might have. Would be nice to list a few of those niceties in the login screen MOTD or in the HOW TO for PING.

[Natan]

Hi people,

I'm glad to announce a new version of the beta 1.12, available here:
http://www.windowsdream.com/dl/PING_1.12/

Changes:

- Now you can choose wether you'll want to reboot or to exit to a shell after the job is completed. The question is raised at first, so no one will have to come back again and again to a computer to be restored. The parameter concerning this behaviour can be written into the /etc/ping.conf file (After_Completion = Reboot | Shell). -- Thanks, Uruiamme, for the suggestion.

- Bug corrections, mostly concerning the writing of an image onto the local HDD (in the case there was only one part on the drive).

Regards
Natan

[Freedom]

I am still having terrible problems with connecting to my 2K3 server. See my separate post please

[Natan]

Hi there;
I've just updated the kernel from 2.6.20.3 to 2.6.20.9 (PING 1.12). It should not change much to most people, but if you've experimented problems with a specific hardware, then you should give it a try. Downloadable here, as usual :
http://www.windowsdream.com/dl/PING_1.12/

Regards
Natan

[Natan]

Hi there;
I've just updated the RAM image of PING 1.12, upgrading Partimage from 0.6.4 to 0.6.5. This has not been so easy to compile the new Partimage... Thanks to everyone for making a little testing.
http://www.windowsdream.com/dl/PING_1.12/

Note: you'll need to update your isolinux.cfg / pxelinux.cfg RAM settings -- a few Mo more are needed.

Regards
Natan

[Natan]

Finally, I've restored the 1.12 release of PING to its previous state (thus, with partimage 0.6.4).

Sorry for the inconvenience for thos who've tested it. I've got things to improve.

Regards
Natan

[jtreubig]

Nathan,

Needed the PXE loading capiblity to use the Ping.conf file + bypass all the network/smb prompts and just present a menu. Made changes to the 1.12 rc.ping file to support this and will offer it to you. Also found that the "Mixed" loading does not support CMOS reload. Felt this was just an oversight. Plan to test the resizing at a later date. If your interested in looking at my changes, let me know how to forward the rc file to you.

Best wishes,
John

[Natan]

Hi there,
there's a new kernel on the 1.12 version. It has been updated to 2.6.21.3, and configured to support IBM ServeRAID adapters.

Downloads:
http://www.windowsdream.com/dl/PING_1.12/

Regards
Natan

[Natan]

Hi people!

I'm glad to announce you the release of PING 2.00 RC1. This is a release candidate because it needs testing. Yet, it's much much different from previous PING releases, and should meet many people's needs.

The Linux part itself has been redone from scratch. Previously, it was made out of RIP (Recovery Is Possible). Now, it has been made out of LFS (Linux From Scratch), and completely customized to PING's needs.

As a result, the image is much smaller, and can now boot on a 128-MB RAM computer. It boots faster, too, has more tools, and supports NTFS better (ntfs-3g rather than captive-ntfs).

PING itself has far more features, including :
- You can choose what parts to backup, and where to store them.
- USB mass storage devices are supported.
- Bootable DVDs can now be made with strictly no user interactivity.
- You can ask for a shell, a reboot, or a shutdown at the end of the process.
- Backuping a system can be done locally, even if you've only got one partition (it will be splitted if necessary).
- Extended partitions are better integrated.
- Systems where boot sector is not in the MBR should be handled properly.
- Linux LVM are handled, even if it could be improved (and will be) -- we currently use zsplit to do this, but will use partimage later.

Get it there :
http://www.windowsdream.com/dl/PING_2.00/

Don't forget to get the Howto, available at the same place.

Cheers
Natan

[Natan]

Already some little bug corrections concerning DVD-spanning.

This is now PING 2.00 RC2.

Get it there :
http://www.windowsdream.com/dl/PING_2.00/

Don't forget to get the Howto, available at the same place.

[jerrison]

[Natan]

Yep, there was definitely a loop problem. Just uploaded RC4... to the same place.

Natan

[jerrison]