CrucibleWDS 2.3.0 Released
I am excited to announce the latest version of CrucibleWDS. Version 2.3.0 is a significant improvement over previous versions. I consider it to be the best release yet with hopefully the fewest bugs and best reliability. This release is where I have been trying to take CrucibleWDS for the past 2 years. I would like to thank all supporters of the project. Whether you have donated your money, your time, provided feedback, or are just simply enjoying the software, I Thank You. Changes include:
- New dynamic partition control system
- Greater support for resizable images
- Enhanced GRUB support
- Full LVM support including imaging to smaller drives
- Full extended/logical partition support including imaging to smaller drives
- Fixed all bugs with On Demand Mode
- Removed .net 3.5 dependency
- On Demand logs can now be viewed in the WebUI
- Logs in the WebUI can now be exported for easier viewing
- Many many other bug fixes
- Technically should allow OSX support, but never tested(Only through EFI boot using the client iso)
This release should address almost every issue that has been raised in the forums, and focuses on the client side imaging process. The imaging process has been significantly altered. It has been streamlined and now takes a more Universal approach to try and create every image in the best way possible. As a result you are no longer required to set an Image OS Type. Any machine that contains at least 1 NTFS or EXT filesystem can be resized and deployed to smaller sized hard drives. It doesn’t matter if it has 1 or 50 partitions. The concept of a standard partition layout has been removed. Install your OS anyway you like. They key to making all this work is the ability for CrucibleWDS to now dynamically create partitions that will fit on the destination drive. Now for the part I may take some heat on. Images created prior to version 2.3.0 are not compatible. The reason being is that for dynamic partition creation to work, a lot of information about the original hard drive is recorded. This information is unavailable for images created before 2.3.0.
The image search view now displays the minimum size hard drive required for each image based upon information that was gathered during the upload. When viewing an image in the WebUI, there is a new option called specs. This lets you selectively pick and choose what hard drives and partitions you would like to restore. It also gives you the ability to set your own size for a partition.