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Administering and managing large-size networked PC systems running Linux is very costly, difficult and time consuming. There are many daily based tasks to do such as software installation and upgrading, user account creation and post-system configuration. From time to time, a new version of the kernel or patches to the kernel are released. This would causes for many hours and manpower of hard work specially you have many machines.
System backup is one of important tasks of system administration. Usually, backup is to copy the whole system to storage media such as magnetic tapes. It would take a large number of tapes to backup all the individual systems in the network. This can be very costly as magnetic tapes are not cheap.
Deployment is another issue. The traditional way of Linux installation is to do it machine by machine with a CDROM. It takes hours to complete just a single OS installation. OS cloning is an alternative, but it also takes quite a long time. Time even takes much longer specially the number of PCs is large.
Unless there is a careful planning beforehand a machine cannot serve more than one operating system. An educational institution often needs a machine to be able to have more than one operating system installed in order to serve different kinds of students or projects.
To address the issues, we presents an innovative Linux OS streaming infra-structure. It includes two Web interface based components known as Central Linux Image Management in Cloud (CLIMIC) and Virtual Disk Image Server (VDIS).
Administering and managing large-size networked PC systems running Linux is very costly, difficult and time consuming. There are many daily based tasks to do such as software installation and upgrading, user account creation and post-system configuration. From time to time, a new version of the kernel or patches to the kernel are released. This would causes for many hours and manpower of hard work specially you have many machines.
System backup is one of important tasks of system administration. Usually, backup is to copy the whole system to storage media such as magnetic tapes. It would take a large number of tapes to backup all the individual systems in the network. This can be very costly as magnetic tapes are not cheap.
Deployment is another issue. The traditional way of Linux installation is to do it machine by machine with a CDROM. It takes hours to complete just a single OS installation. OS cloning is an alternative, but it also takes quite a long time. Time even takes much longer specially the number of PCs is large.
Unless there is a careful planning beforehand a machine cannot serve more than one operating system. An educational institution often needs a machine to be able to have more than one operating system installed in order to serve different kinds of students or projects.
To address the issues, we presents an innovative solution known as Free OS Streaming Infrastructure for Linux (FOSSIL) . FOSSIL includes two Web interface based components known as Central Linux Image maNagement in Cloud (CLINIC) and Virtual Disk Image Server (VDIS).
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