Remote or Unattended Installation Solutions?

HaloZero asks: "I work for a medium-sized company (350+ users), and am charged with new builds and deployments for a mix of aged and new desktops, and a smattering of similar laptops. The hardware is certainly not uniform across the entire infrastructure. Our current deployment 'system' (Ghost/Sysprep, Acronis/NewSID) is somewhat of a kludge -- as my mentor would say -- and I've been looking into alternative, cleaner methods. We're burgeoning on an Active Directory domain, so RIS has been the hot topic on my desk as of late. Does anyone have any experience with RIS? Is there anything that isn't very well documented that I should watch out for? We're considering other unattended install solutions, such as nLite, and a composite of Bart's PE Builder-type setups. Any other suggestions out there?"

Comments

Re:Open Source project: Unattended

[narkotix]

Note that RIS is not a very good solution. Even if you have uniform hardware, (Like Dell's, or HP/Compaq's) changing one driver can muck up the whole process. Not so with unattended. Being an Open Source project, you are im complete control of your build process.
That sounds like a bit of fanboy fud. What problems are you exactly having? We are faced with that same "problem" as well and we have no such issues inserting drivers. I am happy to help if you can explain the problem you are having.