Mirroring a system across network

[bradly.spicer]

Hey guys,

Got a load of computers at work and I want to neaten the system up a bit. I'm completely oblivious to this area :P

Basically I have 9 machines and I want them to all be slaves of 1 machine which in turn will not allow people to save to them (Only to external hard drives) and every day if there is an update on the master machine it will bootup at midnight do the changes and turn back off.

I don't know what the name of this is. What the system is. Where to start etc.

Hoping you guys can help!

[Ketsuekiame]

What OS is your server?

Windows? Linux? UNIX? Some hybrid love child of Bill Clinton, Angela Merkel and the CEO of Norton?

[bradly.spicer]

Windows 7 Professional haha

thanks Ketsuekiame

[Ketsuekiame]

Oh I guess you don't have a server os then...

Hmm, can you explain further what you want it to do? Effectively, what I read from that is:

I want 8 machines to be dumb terminals that you can't save on except to external HDD's and at midnight I want to boot up the master and record the changes that were made during the day.

Is that far off?

[bradly.spicer]

Essentially yes.

[Ketsuekiame]

Okay, do it in reverse. Have a drive that is available to all clients from the master that is read only from the clients. Every night pull the information from the master to the clients (rather than push)

[bradly.spicer]

Now to sound stupid.

Assuming that's the logic out of the way, is there anything specific I need? Do I need any third party software etc?

Thanks

[Ketsuekiame]

Windows Scheduler will probably do what you want, but there are some specific tools to do this. Especially if you want to be clever and perform automatic differential copy and stuff ;)

Otherwise, if you know that the clients will never lose data from a master update, just copy the entire thing from the master.