It occurs to me that (with some work) you could use something like bit torrent to distribute images (as a poor mans alternative to multicast). Advantages are that blocks could come in in any order (so machines would not have to boot in lockstep), and all machines might contribute to uploading blocks so the network IO would be spread out over multiple machines (though the total network capacity is still the same). Disadvantages are that the software becomes rather more complex and there would be no real boost to speed if machines tend to be imaged one at a time.
That would be cool. One of the schools I worked for, had a program called LanDesk, and it would do p2p for deploying windows and also updates. They would have the main server, that gets the updates, then sends it to a few clients, then other clients would connect to those few clients and then it would just grow from there. But we had a few problems, like one time we where deploying windows on every computer at a school, and one of the first computers, that got the information from the main server, got a corrupted copy, then sent it on the all of the other clients. We ended up having to redo everything again. But that would be fixed if they just did a CRC check on all of the files. I think that is what the normal bit torrent does.
