-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Hi Sean, Ambition ideas you have here.... but your concerns about massinstallations of windows and scaleing are legitime. Just two ideas we had for anif.sf.net, a ...
- -- begin comercial --- ... "friendly competitor of unattended" and a bit slicker and also based on linux as a boot-cdrom AND disk, DHCP, clienttypes, perl as script language, Samba as fileserver, PXE-Booting etc. - -- end commercial --- :
1) The use of DHCP-Userclasses helps deploying Windows via ANI with a centralized DHCP Server in flexible way: you can produce bootmedia with diffrent userclasses. When booting, you got the parameters of your requested user-class from the DHCP Server. This way, you can easily make a "poors man load balancing" without having to hardcode shares etc. on your boot media: just send your "installation staff" out with boot media with diffrent userclasses. Aehm... I hope the userclass thing is already implemented in ANI, not so shure at the moment.
2) Part of ANI is the concept to have two hidden partitions, one with the content of the bootmedia and one with the windows installation files like they were downloaded from the server (= the windows-cd - -installation-content). This helps to mass-upgrade later, say from Win2K SP4 to SP5 or to XP or whatever. While booting from floppy/cd-rom/PXE, you can instruct the comupter with an old version of ANI already installed to just download the difference from the share compared to the files in the hidden partition. This greatly reduces net- and serverload.
Plus, if your PCs support Wake-On-Lan, you can boot batches of your clients overnight remotely with a script in a centralized way, wait, till Windows is up, switch the bootable flag remotely to the hidden partition where the content of the bootmedia was stored (for example via http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/psexec.shtml), reboot remotely and the installation gets triggered again in the above described way (just the file diff) => in the morning, the batch of computers are ready with the new OS!
To even reduce network traffic more, you can moreover before a rollout prepare your existing clients with the the new winXY installation files in the same centralized manner in batches: WOL, unhide partition, copy new WinXY-Files to partition, hide partition, shut down. Once, all the computer have been prepared that way, you can make a rollout of let's say 1000 clients in one night and even change some files shortly before you decide to rollout (they will be the only ones being downloaded in the roll-out process).
I don't want to convince you to use ani, but feel free to borrow some of those ideas, have a look at the sources and take what you can use :-).
Cheers A. Schuppisser - -- ~ ------------------------- ~ Substring GmbH ~ Tscharnerstrasse 39a ~ CH-3007 Bern ~ Tel. ++41 (0)31 382 51 12 ~ Fax. ++41 (0)31 382 51 87 ~ http://www.substring.ch
~ SMS via ~ http://www.substring.ch/sms.php?sendto=aschuppisser -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
iD8DBQFBGIDx1jcwhSg/VXQRAjkqAKDVBoNHrJYaohx16hNwBVKuk3RGdQCZAQSj utf2wbqbaf5vhFkyys0pjYE= =5brI -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by Shop4tech.com-Lowest price on Blank Media 100pk Sonic DVD-R 4x for only $29 -100pk Sonic DVD+R for only $33 Save 50% off Retail on Ink & Toner - Free Shipping and Free Gift. http://www.shop4tech.com/z/Inkjet_Cartridges/9_108_r285 _______________________________________________ unattended-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/unattended-devel
