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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?"
Why not use Unattended? http://unattended.sourceforge.net/ - we use it, and it works wonders here. Unattended is a system for fully automating the installation of Windows 2000 Professional and Server, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003. When you are finished setting up Unattended, you will be able to boot any PC from a floppy, from a CD-ROM, or directly from the network, answer a few questions, and come back an hour or two later to a fully-installed Windows workstation. We boot from the network, and the machines build themselves without our intervention. They have a step-by-step guide on how to set it up even.
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.
But this is slashdot. A slashdoter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber!