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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?"
I use Ghost to create networks of up to 300 workstations about once a month. There's no hassle. I made a floppy image for Ghost using FreeDOS and the 3COM universal NDIS driver. That combined with pxelinux's keeppxe option, and every computer boots up off the network with nearly zero configuration necessary (ok, so I have to tell BIOS to boot from the network... big deal). When you get a new type of computer, just update the image to include the new drivers. One image works for all systems.
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
Etherboot has made my life so much easier. As the parent mentioned, Etherboot allows any supported network to do a PXE boot whether or not the card actually supports PXE.
Also if you don't want to carry around a separate disk for each nic, there is a patched disk available at etherboot.anadex.de. That one disk contains support for all Etherboot-supported cards. This can probably be made into a el torito cd, but I haven't tried it.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
I concur with the parent as far as building unattended installs goes:
a few resources (some of which were mentioned earlier):
MSFN.org
nlite
BartPE
Technet XP Deployment ref
Disclaimer: Scan anything you download thoroughly for viruses. The worst thing you could do is inject a vulnerability in your image framework.
If you are in the position to need to reload your systems for any reason remotely I would suggest using a PXE deployment solution of some kind. Ghost/Altiris both provide good PXE and post-install config utilities. We use altiris and deploy our images through PXE. This allows for imaging in place after the fact, something that we try do semi-anually.
Every major vendor provides UNDI-Driver capable on-board nics now-a-days, so the headache of PXE (nic specific) boot images is pretty much a thing of the past (unless you were one of the saps who bought the Gateway E-4300s.)
There's something about booting to your nic, loading an image on a station in 8 minutes and monitoring the unattended install from a remote TS console miles away from the station you're reloading.