I recently installed Norton Ghost 15 on a Win7x64 Ultimate machine with the hopes of backing up all the machines on my net to drives on that machine (basically using it as a NAS.) It took a lot of time to get it working (including a lengthy phone call with Symantec tech support, who knew some of the answers but not all), and there are a lot of questions about this on the forums, so, here's what I discovered. These steps may or may not work on other versions of Ghost or other versions of Windows. Note: all my machines are running Win7 64bit, Ultimate with Windows Firewall.
For convenience I will refer to the machine that is performing the backups as the "server," and the "remote" machines that are being backed up as "clients."
1) You need to have agent running on any client machine. Ghost cannot perform a remote deployment of Agent to a Win7 machine. So, you must install Ghost on each client machine. The owners manual says:
You must purchase a separate license for each computer you want to manage. You can deploy the agent without a license for a 60-day evaluation. After that time, you must purchase and install the license to continue managing the remote computer.
However, apparently you cant buy licenses for just the Agent, you will need a full license for Ghost for each machine - server and clients. Also, the "60" days is incorrect. It is 30 days.
2) There are three services that must be running for this to work. "Norton Ghost", "Symantec SymSnap VSS Provider", and "SymSnap Service". Launch the services panel by clicking the start button and entering "services.msc" Find each of these services and set them to "Automatic" and start them. I have no idea why Norton install doesnt do this itself. Also, on my machines I set the Norton Ghost service to run as myself instead of the default Local Service. I dont know if this is necessary or not, but havent had the time to go back and try undoing that to see if Ghost stops working. Also, I did these steps on both the server and client machines - it is possible that it is only required on the server machine. Again, no time to research further.
3) If you are running a firewall, you must allow Norton Ghost and its services through the firewall. I am using the default Windows Firewall. On the forums there are threads that talk about opening various TCP and UDP ports (notably 135, 136, 1345, 1346, 1347). I found this didnt work (as well as being a pain in the **bleep** to do all the steps required to open these ports for each of the services.) What worked for me in this configuration is:
- Launch Control Panel/Windows Firewall.
- Click "Allow a program or feature through Windows Firewall"
- Find Norton Ghost in the list and turn on the checkmark. If it isnt in the list, click "Allow another program", find your NG install, which is normally C:\Program Files (x86)\Norton Ghost, go to the Console subdirectory, and add VProConsole_.exe. (note the "_" in the name.)
- You will then also need to allow the following programs through as well:
- Console\VProConsole.exe
- Agent\VProSvc.exe
You should reboot the clients and servers, just to be safe. Now, finally, on the server machine you should be able to see the client machine and do a remote backup. Whew.
Why Symantec hasnt documented any of this, and why Ghost install doesnt take care of it, is beyond me. My apologies for not refining this further, but I killed too many hours making this work already - just wanted to quickly write this up for anyone else facing this scenario. I wouldnt be surprised if at least a couple of the above steps can be removed. If anyone has time to refine this, please add to this thread.
Andrew