I was part of a 150 PC RIS (Remote Installation Services) deployment, and
was pretty unhappy with the results. It tooks us about 1.5 hrs/PC to back up
the existing Win98 machines via a networked Ghost, and then deploy with PXE,
run thru the mini-setup and reconfigure personal settings.
Unless you plan on waiting a while for installs, I'd suggest making Ghost or
similar CD's instead of trying to load over the network. The other problem
we had with 3Com NIC's was half of our PXE-boots wouldn't grap a DHCP lease
until 5 reboots or so.
Just a word of caution though, make sure you're installing on the PC's with
compatible HAL's and disk drives (a SysPrep image needs the BIOS (ACPI or
APM) and the hard drive (IDE or SCSI) to be the same as the copied PC.
Everything else will be installed by a mini Plug-n-Play setup routine. Of
course, if your components don't have MS supplied drivers, you'll need to do
a little research and place them in the correct folders and .inf sections.)
-----Original Message-----
From: MURDOCH Damian [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Monday, September 10, 2001 1:21 AM
To: NT System Admin Issues
Subject: RE: FW: unattended install speed
Dan
I had never thought about stopping the Sysprep at that point!
That should solve my problem! Thanks a lot.
Cheers
Damian
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Monday, 10 September 2001 12:02 PM
To: NT System Admin Issues
Subject: Re: FW: unattended install speed
After you do the install you need to run sysprep and have your dos boot
floppy in the drive so you can ghost the image when sysprep reboots.
Then
you can load that image onto a target machine and sysprep will run the
mini-install when the machine is booted the first time. It will do the
sid change and you can edit the inf file to do other customization as
well.
Then if you make some .dif files of your applications with Sysdiff you
can
write scripts that will load the apps without doing installs. This
all
takes some time to set up but you save a lot of time in the long run,
and
you have all your configuration documented in your scripts. After we
got
down this path, we have a whole server full of images and difs and
scripts,
and some boot floppies that are all set up to make the entire images for
each different job function we have. We also have NDS and Zen which
we
use too - you can go either way. If you have A/D you can use ris and
application publishing to accomplish the same thing. This is all about
getting organized and getting ahead of crisis mode ...........
"MURDOCH Damian"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED] To: "NT System
Admin Issues" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
ld.gov.au> cc:
Subject: FW:
unattended install speed
09/09/2001 06:49 PM
Please respond to "NT
System Admin Issues"
> Hi
>
> Currently in our environment we are looking at rolling out win2k to
> the desktop.
> With NT they used to image stuff and use a 3rd party sid changer to
> change the sids.
> I see the benefits of totally using an unattended install over doing
> the same with 2k.
> My problem is speed, an image may take 15 minutes to rebiuld a pc,
> whereas an unattend will take an hour.
> An hour is unacceptable downtime, if there is a problem rather than
> bugger around its easy to image a pc and have them on the air again.
>
> Is there any way that you guys know of to overcome the speed issue ?
> Whether its a partial image etc.
>
> I would be very interested in how other large organisations are
> rebuilding and deploying pc's.
>
> Cheers
>
> Damian Murdoch
> NT Systems Engineer
>
> CorTechS
> Gold Coast City Council
> W: (07) 55816112
> M: 0414 180 950
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
>
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