g4u - Harddisk Image Cloning for PCs

Support free software or g4u WILL die!

1. What is it? 2. Why not one of the alternatives? 3. Requirements & Download 4. Using it 4.1 Preparations 4.2 Image creation 4.3 Image deployment 4.4 Copying a disk locally 5. FAQs and hints on disk cloning 5.1 Supported filesystems 5.2 Supported Operating Systems 5.3 Supported Hardware 5.4 A word on disk sizes 5.5 Changing compression level 5.6 List of recognized disks 5.7 Problems with images at 2GB 5.8 Can you add feature XXX? 5.9 Problems with network performance 5.10 Reducing the image size 5.11 Setting IP-number manually 5.12 Extracting the g4u kernel 6. Rebuilding from source 7. Links & Ressources 8. History 9. Copying, license & donations

1. What is it?

g4u ("ghost for unix") is a NetBSD-based bootfloppy/CD-ROM that allows easy cloning of PC harddisks to deploy a common setup on a number of PCs using FTP. The floppy/CD offers two functions. First is to upload the compressed image of a local harddisk to a FTP server. Other is to restore that image via FTP, uncompress it and write it back to disk; network configuration is fetched via DHCP. As the harddisk is processed as a image, any filesystem and operating system can be deployed using g4u. Easy cloning of local disks as well as partitions is also supported.

For the curious, I've added a few screenshots:

1. Booting g4u in bochs
2. Device detection
3. Welcome to g4u!
4. Some random g4u commands
5. Uploading a disk image with uploaddisk
6. Restoring with slurpdisk

2. Why not one of the alternatives?

• Server-part often runs (only) under DOS/Windows. I wanted to use a Unix based server.
• Supported filesystems include everything from Microsoft, but others are not handled properly (Solaris/x86, NetBSD, ...)
• I don't want to deal (ever again) with making a DOS-based bootfloppy, that gets it's IP-number via DHCP.
• I've played with doing multicast-based deployment based on imm, but the result was so slow I decided not to persue it.

3. Requirements & Download

• An empty 1.44MB floppy disk or an empty CD
• A FTP-server with some GB free space
• A DHCP-server

In addition to that, you may want:

• The g4u 1.17 floppy image (zipped/uncompressed)
• The g4u 1.17 ISO CD image (zipped/uncompressed)
• The g4u 1.17 source

You can also download from one of these mirrors:

• Australia
• Canada

4. Using it

4.1 Preparations

• Using the g4u floppy image:
  1. Download the floppy image, g4u-1.17.fs or g4u-1.17.fs.zip
  2. If you downloaded the g4u-1.17.fs.zip file, unpack it to get g4u-1.17.fs
  3. Write the image to disk. Under Unix, a simple "cat g4u-1.17.fs >/dev/diskette" will do. Make yourself familiar with the name of your floppy device, some common ones are:
     • NetBSD: /dev/fd0a
     • Solaris: /dev/diskette
     • Linux: /dev/fd0

     If you're using DOS, use rawrite.exe. There's also a Windows-based program available called rawrite32.

• Using the g4u CDROM ISO image:
  1. Download the CDROM ISO image, g4u-1.17.iso or g4u-1.17.iso.zip
  2. If you downloaded the g4u-1.17.iso.zip file, unpack it to get g4u-1.17.iso
  3. Please consult your CDROM writing software (Nero, DiskJuggler, WinOnCD, cdrecord, ...) 's manual on how to write the g4u.iso file to a CDROM. Note that the image is bootable.

• On a FTP server of your choice, create an user-account called "install", and protect it with some password. Make sure the 'install' user can login via ftp (/etc/shells...)

  If you want to use a different account, you can specify "login@server" for slurpdisk and uploaddisk.

4.2 Image creation

• Boot the CD or floppy on the machine you want to clone. See it read the kernel from disk, then print out all the devices found in the machine. It will do DHCP next, asking for an IP number - be sure you have DHCP configured properly! At the end you'll get a text description of possible commands, and a shell prompt.
• Whole harddisk:
  Type "uploaddisk your.ftp.server.com filename.gz" to read out the machine's harddisk (rwd0d), and put it into the "install" account of your FTP server under the given filename. The disk image is compressed (with gzip -9), so maybe use a ".gz" file suffix. You don't have to, though. Before putting the file on the FTP server, the "install" account's password is requested.

  If you want to clone your second IDE disk, add it's name on the uploaddisk command line: "uploaddisk your.ftp.server.com filename.gz wd1". Similarly, if you use SCSI instead of IDE disks, use "uploaddisk your.ftp.server.com filename.gz sd0".

  If you want to use a different account name than "install", use "account@your.ftp.server.com" for both uploaddisk and slurpdisk.

• One partition:
  Get an overview of disks recognized by g4u by typing "disks", a list of partitions on a certain disk is available via "parts disk", where disk is one of the disks printed by "parts", e.g. wd0, wd1, sd0, etc. Partitions are numbered with letters starting from 'a', where partitions a-d are usually predefined, with your partitions starting at 'e'. Partitions here are BSD-partitions, which have little in common with DOS MBR partitions. To specify a partition, use something like "wd0e" or "sd0f": "uploadpart your.ftp.server.com filename.gz wd0e". Run "uploadpart" without arguments for more examples.
• Wait until you're back at the shell prompt (ignore the errors :-). Depending on your network, CPU, harddisk hardware and contents, image creation can take several hours!
• You can switch off the machine now. Type "halt" or simply press reset/power button - there are no filesystems mounted so no harm will result.
• Check that your FTP server's "install" account now has the image file.

4.3 Image deployment

• Boot the CD or floppy to the shell prompt again, see above.
• Whole harddisk:
  Type "slurpdisk your.ftp.server.com filename.gz". This will log into the FTP server's "install" account, verify the password, then retrieve the image, uncompress it and write it back to /dev/rwd0d.

  If you want to restore to a SCSI disk, add the disk's name to the slurpdisk command line, e.g. "slurpdisk your.ftp.server.com filename.gz sd0".

  See above if you want to use an account name other than "install".

• One partition:
  Use "slurppart your.ftp.server.com filename.gz wd0e" or whatever values you passed to uploadpart. Please note that the partition information is taken from your MBR, which is expected to be the same as before image creation - expect surprises if you change something between image creation and deployment. In case of inevitable changes, check the start sector and size values given by "parts". For an image that includes the MBR, do a full backup with "uploaddisk".
• Reboot the machine (type "reboot" or press reset button), and see if your machine comes up as expected - it should!

4.4 Copying a disk locally

If you just want to copy one local disk to another one with no network & server involved, the "copydisk" command is what you want. E.g. to copy the first IDE disk to the second IDE disk, use "copydisk wd0 wd1", to do the same for SCSI disks: "copydisk sd0 sd1".

A list of disks as found during system startup can be found using the "disks" command.

5. FAQs and hints on disk cloning

5.1 Supported filesystems

One of the questions arising a lot is "what filesystems does g4u support". The answer is: "all of them". g4u reads the disk bit by bit, starting from byte #0 to the end. It includes any MBR, boot record, partition table and the partitions themselves without further investigating the structure of the data stored in these partitions.

5.2 Supported Operating Systems

The question on operating systems that can be deployed with g4u is the same as for the filesystems: any. Given the image-approach again, g4u is able to handle any operating system. Systems that were cloned successfully include NetBSD, Solaris/x86, Windows NT and 2000.

With some minor effort, g4u can even be used to deploy operating systems for non-PC based SCSI machines running HP-UX, Irix, Solaris, AIX etc.

5.3 Supported Hardware

The system running g4u itself can have IDE or SCSI disks with various controllers (Adaptec, ...) as well as wide range of IDE and PCI network cards. Please see the g4u kernel config for the full list of supported hardware.

g4u does currently not support a lot of laptop/notebook hardware (PCMCIA/CardBus, FireWire), sorry.

5.4 A word on disk sizes

The question how g4u deals with different disk sizes arises a lot too. The general answer is, g4u works best with identical disk sizes & geometry. Putting an image from a small disk on a big disk works, putting an image from a big disk to a small disk is likely to cause problems.

If you cannot avoid preparing an image on a big disk that'll get deployed to a small disk later, make sure the "extra" space is not occupied by a active partition or filesystem, else data loss is very likely to occur!

If you intend to deploy a "small" image to a "big" disk, the extra space that's not covered by g4u can be used for creating a partition and a filesystem. You will have to do that on your own, e.g. using your operating systems' post installation steps.

5.5 Changing compression level

Per default, images uploaded to the FTP server are compressed with "gzip -9". This saves as much disk space as possible, but also takes a long time - several hours are not uncommon. You can reduce the gzip level for "uploaddisk" by setting the GZIP environment variable:

# GZIP=-1 uploaddisk your.ftp.server.com filename.gz

You can change compression levels between 1 (fast, little compression) and 9 (slow, maximum compression). Of course you can specify all the usual options to uploaddisk.

5.6 List of recognized disks

During startup of g4u, all devices recognized are listed, but very fast. To get a list of recognized disks, use the 'disks' command:

# disks
wd0 at pciide0 channel 0 drive 0: 
wd0: drive supports 16-sector pio transfers, lba addressing
wd0: 6149 MB, 13328 cyl, 15 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 12594960 sectors
wd0: 32-bit data port
wd0: drive supports PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 2
wd0(pciide0:0:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 2 (using DMA data transfers)

The above example shows a 6GB IDE harddisk.

5.7 Problems with images at 2GB

Do you experience g4u aborting file transfers after the image has grown to 2 GB on the FTP server? The problem here is not g4u, but most likely your FTP server. Some older Linux distributions are known to only allow files of up to 2GB filesize, and even if there is a Linux 2.4 kernel running, that's no guarantee for a properly working server. Make sure that your ftp daemon is upto date, or install a decent operating system.

So far, whatever FTP server comes with NetBSD, Solaris and Windows 2000 has been used without problems.

5.8 Can you add feature XXX?

I got requests for adding many features to g4u:
• using TFTP
• using SSH/scp
• using NFS
• adding a X or curses based GUI
• writing images to CDROM / deployment from CDROM
• support for PCMCIA/CardBus
• bzip2 compression

The problem with them is all the same: they need space, and there is already too little on the floppy due to the many drivers contained on it. Suggestions on what drivers to remove are welcome. Moving away from floppy to CD-only distribution is not an option for me at this point, sorry.

5.9 Problems with network performance

If upload performance is weak (less than 5MBytes/sec on a 100BaseT Ethernet switch) even with a small compression level or a fast CPU and the harddisk is idle this means the network sucks. A common problem in switched Ethernet is a duplex mismatch between the NIC and the switch. In NetBSD, the default is to negotiate speed and duplex automatically. Other settings can be set manually.

Enforcing 100BaseTX/Full-duplex

# ifconfig fxp0 media 100BaseTX mediaopt Full-duplex
# ifconfig -a
 fxp0: flags=[...]
 media: Ethernet 100baseTX full-duplex 

Using autonegotiation (default)

# ifconfig fxp0 media auto
# ifconfig -a
 fxp0: flags=[...]
 media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX)

For more information, please see the ifconfig(8) manpage as asll as the Auto-Negotiation Valid Configuration Table featuring "Why Can't the Speed and Duplex Be Hardcoded On Only One Link Partner?".

5.10 Reducing the image size

People complain that the image resulting from g4u is very big. This is normal as g4u clones the whole disks with all blocks, not attributing if they contain any valid data or if they are empty/unused. To find empty/unused blocks (and not clone them), g4u would need intimate understanding of the contained filesystem, which is different again for each filesystem - Windows FAT, Linux Ext2/3/ReiserFS/..., BSD FFS, Solaris UFS, etc. Given both tight space limitations on the floppy as well as shortage on filesystem documentation and implementations available, teaching g4u to ignore empty blocks is not likely to happen.

But there is an easy way to circumvent the problem: use the native operating system's understanding (and implementation) of the filesystem, and make sure it prepares empty/unused blocks in a way so they don't contain random garbage data but values which can be compressed easily by g4u, thus resulting in small image sizes.

Effectively, you just fill up the disk's unused blocks with zero-bytes. Open file for writing, stuff in 0-bytes until the disk is full, then close the file and remove it. The result is that all unused blocks were used by the file, and filled with data that g4u can then compress easily. Usually the operating system will just mark the blocks as unused, without changing the actual data content.

Using this technique on a 20GB disk that had 6GB Solaris 8/x86 and the rest Windows 2000 Workstation shrunk the image from ~6GB compressed to ~2GB compressed. You can probably imagine the effect of this on deployment time too. :)

To perform the filling of unused data blocks with zero-bytes, there are several ways, depending on what operating system you use on your computer, and what software you have available:

Standard Unix:

This works on any Unix variant - Linux, NetBSD, Solaris, etc.:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/0bits bs=20971520   # bs=20m
rm /0bits

Windows Perl solution:

This one needs perl installed. In a command shell, type:

cd /d c:\
c:\win-preclone.pl c:

Click here to download the win-preclone.pl perl script.

Windows Pascal solution:

This pascal program was contributed by Matthias Jordan [mjordan at code-fu dot de]:

• nullfile-1.02.exe
• nullfile-1.02.pas

The programs are provided here without warranty.

Windows "Erasor":

This freeware program can erase your disk in a safe way, but it can also be told to just write a pattern of all-0-bits to the disk. Grab it at www.heidi.ie/eraser. Thanks to Stephen Krans [s040 at krans dot org] for the hint!

Run any of these right before shutting down the operating system to create an image with g4u, and see the size difference.

5.11 Setting IP-number manually

Sometimes you may not want or be able to use DHCP. In that case doing the network configuration manually is possible with g4u, too:
1. Find out if your network device is recognized, and by what name, using the command

    ifconfig -a

   Your network device is something like "ex0", "tlp0", etc. (Note that unlike in Linux, NetBSD doesn't call all ethernet cards "eth0"!)

2. Next configure the network device's IP number and netmask. It is assumed that your network device is xx0 here, and that the machine should run with IP number 1.2.3.4 and netmask 255.255.255.0:

    ifconfig xx0 1.2.3.4 netmask 255.255.255.0

3. Last, you may want to make the default router known unless your FTP server is in the same IP subnet as the machine you want to use g4u on. Let's say the default router's IP address is 2.3.4.5, then the command to enter is:

    route add default 2.3.4.5 

That's all - simple, huh? Just remember that g4u is still Unix! After these steps, you should be able to use g4u just as if it used DHCP.

5.12 Extracting the g4u kernel

I've been asked how to boot g4u from harddisk (using e.g. grub). The idea is to extract the kernel from the boot floppy, and hand that to grub (or whatever bootloader you want - anyone got docs on a PXE setup?). Here's how to extract the kernel, named "netbsd":

% dd if=g4u-1.17.fs bs=512 skip=16 | tar vxf -
-r--r--r-- feyrer/cvs    53788 2004-07-15 02:49 boot
-rw-rw-r-- feyrer/cvs  1397892 2004-07-15 02:49 netbsd
2864+0 records in
2864+0 records out

6. Rebuilding from source

The g4u package is based on NetBSD boot floppy disk. It consists of a custom kernel and custom bootfloppy, both stripped down to an absolute minimum to fit on a 1.44MB floppy disk. There are also the "copydisk", "uploaddisk" and "slurpdisk" scripts.

To rebuild the images:

• Note that for rebuilding, no root permissions are needed any more! Below, the "#" prompt shows action needed as root, "%" is the prompt for commands executed as user.

• Get a i386/PC machine running NetBSD 1.6.2. Cross-building from other Unix-like operating systems may work too, but is untested as far as g4u is concerned.

• Get NetBSD-current source from ~April 12th 2004 as /usr/src:

   % su
   # mkdir /usr/cvs
   # chown $USER /usr/cvs
   # ln -s cvs/src /usr/src
   # exit
   % cd /usr/cvs
   % env CVS_RSH=ssh cvs -d anoncvs@anoncvs.netbsd.org:/cvsroot co -D 20040412 src 

• To be on the safe side, rebuild a full release (regression testing and more):

   % ./build.sh -N 1 -U distribution 

• Remember where to find the new compiler - adjust as necessary:

   % setenv T /usr/src/obj.i386/tooldir.NetBSD-1.6.2-i386/bin 

• Get the g4u 1.17 sources

• Unpack the g4u sources:

   % cd /usr/src
   % tar plzvxf .../g4u-1.17.tgz

• Apply two patches:

   % cd /usr/src/sys/dev/ata
   % patch wd.c <wd.c.patch-g4u
   % cd /usr/src/sys/dev/scsipi
   % patch sd.c <sd.c.patch-g4u
  

• Build the G4U floppy & ISO-image:

   % cd /usr/src/distrib/i386/floppies/g4u
   % $T/nbmake-i386 

• After that, you'll find a "g4u.fs" in the /usr/src/distrib/i386/floppies/g4u/iso dir, "g4u.iso" is in the .../floppies/g4u dir:

   % pwd
   /usr/cvs/src/distrib/i386/floppies/g4u
   % ls -l g4u.*
   -rw-rw-r--  1 feyrer  cvs  1572864 Apr 12 17:48 g4u.iso
   -rw-rw-r--  2 feyrer  cvs  1474560 Apr 12 17:48 g4u.fs 

7. Links & Ressources

A tutorial for installing M0n0wall with g4u:

Roberto Pereyra provided me with instructions on how to install the M0n0wall firewall with g4u. Cool to see them provide their own disk images!

The iR110/150 (sparc64) dd Network Backup Page:

People have asked me for a UltraSPARC (sparc64) based version of g4u. Well here's one: The iR110/150 dd Network Backup Page documents scripts that do disk backups of an UltraSPARC system to a remote NFS server. Bonus to the author for using Solaris! :-)

Yet Another Ghost Installer (YAGI):

Daniel Ettle's diploma thesis which I supervised, about a network based installer at Toshiba Regensburg Operations.

Symantec Ghost

Commercial product that didn't do what I needed and which led me to create g4u. Still, check it our if you want non-image based cloning. If you think they're too expensive, remember that I don't want to starve too. :)

8. History

	Today I had to discover that someone used g4u as a source for g4l, but instead of giving proper credit and respecting the licensing and copyright on g4u, all traces were removed that the core work was done by me. Instead, the author put his name in and his work under a different license. I'm not happy about this, and ask people to discourage such actions as well as to despise the the author of g4l (cowardly calling himself only "nme"). Read more about this in my blog.
1.17	Major bugfix release which intends to address all the flaws in previous releases (see release notes for 1.15 and 1.16)! Besides the Freshmeat g4u page, interested parties can now find a g4u community with forum etc. on Orkut - drop me a mail if you want/need an invitation or have any questions (just as before :)! [20040718]
Back to 1.15!	There's a critical flaw in slurpdisk and other restore facilities in 1.16, which render g4u 1.16 unusable. The QA team has been fired, and we're back to 1.15. Sorry! :( [20040702]
1.16	OK, let's see if I got things right this time: Fixed copydisk, which I broke while adding the progress bar code. Document default GZIP level when calling uploaddisk and uploadpart with no argument. Shaved more space from the config by going for the generic PCIIDE driver (only; please let me know if this made things a lot slower and if it killed SATA-support esp. if enabling IDE in your BIOS won't help - and send me a SATA-equipped machine to test this in the future! :-), removed 'rnd', gave the kernel a fixed device to start from (the ramdisk), removed COMPAT_*. Replaced console driver - you may need to turn on support for USB keyboards in your BIOS! [20040630]
still 1.15	There's a bug in the "copydisk" command of g4u 1.15, please use g4u 1.14 if you need the copydisk command.
still 1.15	I have a donations page now!
1.15	Finally: Improved progress report! No more dots, volume transferred and current throughput is printed instead. Other changes: 'help' command to re-print help screen; update help screen a bit and made the prompt look a bit friendlier. Consistent GZIP handling. Building as non-root is now fully working (Thanks NetBSD!). No more Token Ring drivers, sorry, ran into space issues again. Thank for everyone who has donated so far, I'm working on a donations page. FWIW, donations of books from Amazon are welcome as well, see my wishlist: [20040412]
1.14	After some minor *cough* bugs in 1.13, here's 1.14. No more "file system full" etc., no functional changes either. Added a few screenshots to the documentation. Keep the donations coming! :-) [20040218]
Still 1.13	Source update! The sources released for 1.13 had a small problem (missing gz_compress, etc. while linking), I've updated the g4u-1.13.tgz source archive. Proper checksums are 2226011164 (CRC, cksum(1)) and fa2e2f00b079be1a9cf1c81d625896b1 (MD5). [20040122]
1.13	13's a bad sign, and version 1.13 means so for g4u. Due to my job situation I'm not sure if I can continue working on g4u in the future. Your donations can motivate to do so - paypal@feyrer.de is waiting for you. Today, g4u is mentioned in in one place with commercial products like PowerQuests's DriveImage and Norton's Ghost. g4u is free software and I hoped upon it's users to support it via donations. If I just got $10 from everyone sending me questions about g4u, that'd be more than enough. Fact is that only 1 person has donated back some money so far. Here's your chance to contribute back to the Open Source community - join in! Griping aside, V1.13 is a wrapup based on NetBSD-current as of Jan 14th 2004, esp. made after many people hat troubles booting 1.12. New drivers are for Adaptec 29320, 39320 (aic790x) SCSI (ahd), Broadcom 4401 10/100 Ethernet (bge), DECchip 21x4x and clones Ethernet (tlp), Intel 8254x gigabit (wm), Intel IGP01E1000 MII driver (igphy), Intel i31244 and SiI SATALink SATA controllers. See the g4u kernel config file for all the details. Matthias Jordan has also sent me an update of his "nullfile" to v1.02 which I've added to the g4u webpage. Due to some things growing again, I had to remove all Wireless LAN and most PCI RAID controller drivers. Maybe it's time to start special g4u versions for laptops (with pcmcia, cardbus, usb, wavelan), servers (with raid, ...) in addition to the current version of g4u. Let me know if you're interested! [20040111]
1.13pre2	Prerelease of 1.13 ISO after many people had problems booting the 1.12 ISO. No new features, but two administrative things to note: First, I've lost my job on Jan 1st 2004 due to the Bavarian government killing jobs in academics. That job was the main motivation behind creating g4u, and development of g4u beyond that date is uncertain. I plan to do at least one more release to wrap up things, but that'll need some more time to decide what drivers to include (not). Second, I have created a paypal account paypal@feyrer.de, if you want to donate money, buy me a pizza or coke or just SUPPORT FREE SOFTWARE, do so! (Judging by the feedback I got both in personal mail and in public forums, g4u seems to be a major alternative to some commercial products these days. I'd be happy if the people using it could give some money back to make it possible to continue working on the project! Yes, this is a plea for help!)
1.12	Fix broken dd commmand ("out of memory!"). [20030820]
1.11	New commands "uploadpart" and "slurppart" to save and restore partitions. Partition information is not changed and taken from MBR. Command 'disks' to list disks found, command 'parts' to list (BSD!) partitions on a given disk (wd0, ...). "uploaddisk" now has a default of rwd0d.gz for the imagename, so just "uploaddisk server" should work (just as "slurpdisk server" does already). [20030819]
1.10	Bugfix release: make "GZIP=1 uploaddisk ..." work properly; document how to use a different account than 'install'. Document how to get the image size down by filling unused disk blocks with zero-bytes. [20030603]
1.9	Maintenance update for NetBSD-current as of today; "dmesg" is now page-wise (|more); "disks" lists disks recognized on boot; allow setting GZIP=-1 to get lower compression; increased NMBCLUSTERS for usb2ethernet; Cloning from local disk to local disk with "clonedisk"; Lots of doc updates. [20030522]
1.8	The Pumpkin Release! Sync with NetBSD 1.6. Now includes drivers for USB, RAID cards, Gigabit Ethernet and Token Ring. As a Halloween special, g4u now also comes as ISO image file in addition to a floppy image, so it can be booted from a CD instead of a floppy. Happy Halloween! :) [20021031]
1.7	Update to accomodate latest drivers and kernel features from NetBSD 1.5.2. Fixed download of the .fs files from the web server. Added documentation about disk sizes. [20010919]
1.6	Maintenance release to use latest drivers from NetBSD 1.5.1. Due to increased size, the Token Ring driver was removed, sorry. Greeting message of g4u with instructions was improved a bit. Web site now has a copy of the kernel config, for documentation of supported device drivers. [20010516]
1.5	This release adds support for easy cloning of SCSI disks by giving "sd0" as the third argument to slurpdisk and uploaddisk. Also, support for i386 and i486 CPUs was added. [20010515]
1.4	Maintenance release. [20010306]
	Played with GIMP to create the Animation next to the TOC. Thanks to the XBill artists for the OS images! Various doc updates. [20010306]
	Updated the web page a bit to answer various questions on supported filesystems and operating systems I got. Also add TOC. [20010305]
1.3	Another bugfix release. This should get to a working state soon (i.e. now) [20010302]
1.2	Bugfix release, the ramdisk was busted so that many commands just didn't work (ftp, ...) [20010301]
1.1	First public release, updated to NetBSD 1.5 [20010228]
1.0	Internal version based on NetBSD 1.4 that's been in use for two years in internal operation.

9. Copying, license & donations

No license fees are requested, donations are always welcome! You can send money via paypal or buy me a book from my Amazon wishlist, as many of the people who have donated so far did - Thank you very much! g4u is distributed under the standard BSD license:

/*
 * Copyright (c) 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004
 *	Hubert Feyrer .  All rights reserved.
 *
 * Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
 * modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
 * are met:
 * 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
 *    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
 * 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
 *    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
 *    documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
 * 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software
 *    must display the following acknowledgement:
 *	This product includes software developed for g4u by
 *	Hubert Feyrer <hubert@feyrer.de>.
 * 4. Neither the name of the author nor the names of its contributors
 *    may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software
 *    without specific prior written permission.
 *
 * THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND
 * ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE
 * IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE
 * ARE DISCLAIMED.  IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE
 * FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL
 * DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS
 * OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION)
 * HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT
 * LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY
 * OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF
 * SUCH DAMAGE.
 */