[VoIP] 1-762 Down for Maintenance

[Donald Froula]

1-762 (projectmf.homelinux.com) will be down for
maintenance this morning while I use the system to
clone several backups of my working hard drive.

I've come by a few more of the Wyse thin client boxes
that I have been using for my Asterisk/ProjectMF
system for the last 6 months.

These are Wyse 941Gs. They look more like a mini PC.
They are convection-cooled, run at 1 GHz, and have 512
Mbyte of RAM installed. They run Windows XPe
(XP-embedded) from a small FLASH memory module plugged
directly into a standard IDE controller slot. They
also have a usable PCI slot that I use for a dual
Ethernet card for the ProjectMF TDMoE trunks.

I've been pulling the module, connecting a 6 Gbyte IDE
drive, and changing the BIOS to boot from an external
USB CD drive and then the hard drive. There is no CD
ROM installed. I am using a USB CDROM that connects to
2 of the available 4 USB ports (the extra is for
power).

The standard BIOS works fine for detecting these
devices. The BIOS is password protected ("Fireport").
If the backup battery coin cell is removed, the BIOS
reverts to factory defaults of booting from the FLASH
module, and password locks again. I keep the password
written inside the case to refresh my failing memory!

I'm cloning my operating disk with a free LINUX
utility called PING (Partimage is not Ghost). I booted
off the CD, made with the .iso image on the web site.
It attached an external USB drive I used for backup
and allowed me to backup all partitions, even the BIOS
settings. I backed up to a USB drive formatted as
FAT32. PING even broke the backup files into smaller
chunks to accommodate the 4 Gbyte file size limit of
FAT32.

It is also possible to make a series of DVDs with the
backup images and restore a system from those. This
might be the ticket for getting CNET members up and
running quickly.

D.