The main advantage of Ghost Multicasting is that the downloading time is extremely shortened as only one PC is downloading the image off the Server which dramatically reduces the risk of heavy network traffic.
The only disadvantage is that the PC chosen to be the Ghost Server has to have enough free hard drive space to store the image which will then be redistributed.
The Two Methods Of Ghost Multicasting.
Manually Specified Ghost Multicast
Using this method you have to manually assign unique IP addresses for the Client PCs by using and configuring the wattcp.cfg file located on each Clients' boot disk.
Automatically Specified Ghost Multicast
This second method is by using Windows NT to automatically assign IP addresses to the Client PCs by the use of the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, or DHCP, included in Windows NT ver. 4.00.
Manually Specified Ghost Multicasting:
Setting Up Ghost Server Disk
1. Prepare a boot disk that includes and loads the necessary network drivers and maps the disk images directory from the network.
2. Copy over the DOS Ghost Server program (dosghsrv.exe) to the same disk and add it to the autoexec.bat file.
3. Copy over the wattcp.cfg file to the disk and change the IP Address, Subnet Mask and Gateway according to network. (A special IP Address should be allocated for the Server PC)
Setting Up Client Disks
1. Prepare boot disks in the same order for the server boot disk but copy over ghost.exe instead of dosghsrv.exe.
2. Edit the wattcp.cfg and add in a unique IP Address for each boot disk. (Usually IP Addresses would have been set up earlier for the specific use of identifying ghost client PCs)
Ghosting Client PCs
1. Load up the PC which will act as the Ghost Server with the