Sunday, December 17
Dr. Strangeinstall
(Or how I quit worrying and learned to love Remote Installation Services)
Ok, if you are a regular reader, you might remember way, way back in 2003 I was in a Coma for a while.
At that time I had recently upgraded a bank to Windows 2000, and had setup Microsoft's Remote Installation Services (RIS) on one of their shiny new servers, complete with a separate Image Partition. We were supposed to roll out all new computers to the bank that year, and I was looking forward to working out RIS, and getting the PCs setup that way.
Then came the Coma, and I was out for a little over three months.
While I was out, all the systems got installed, but no one bothered with RIS.
Flash forward to 2006 and now the guy I worked for at that bank is my new boss.
I get to install RIS.
Ok, so I've got a junked Compaq DL380 server with 4 9.1 GB HDDs that I can use as a test bed. Ok, setup one drive for booting, the other three as a 18GB RAID 5. Loaded Windows 2003, patched, joined the domain. Loaded and configured RIS as per the following documents from Microsoft:
Step-by-Step Guide to Remote OS Installation
An old Windows 2000 White Paper on installing RIS that a friend sent to me and I can't find a link for any longer.
Ok, loaded RIS and ran the RIS setup with my handy dandy HP Windows XP SP2 CD-ROM with no problems.
Loaded my new HP system using their media and my Windows NT SIF setup floppy without issues. However, when I went to run RIPrep.exe, it failed out. E-mailed my buddy, I have to go and find the updated version of RIPrep.exe for Windows XP.
Still had issues, getting the image up to the server worked well, but pulling the image back fails with an issue that no network card driver for my hardware was present in my image.
Back to the research. So, I found this article How to Add OEM Plug and Play Drivers to Windows XP at Microsoft Support, and using the instructions to create the Drivers directory structure in the Root of C:, then creating the Sysprep directory and configuration file.
Now I could push the image up and pull the image down. I have a good base image for our current standardized system.
Next step, try it with the machine joined to the domain, fully patched and with Office 2003 installed.
Works great.
As a final step, we actually have four discreet banks, and some of the software is unique to each bank, so I created four more loads, each prepped for one of the banks we own.
To test this we rolled out a RIS imaged set of systems to a brand new bank. It worked great. The only issue we encountered was the need of a DHCP server at the site where we were working. To resolve this problem, I found a great piece of software called ipLease that is a little tricky to use, but a great DHCP server. I used it to create a 2 address scope with a 60 second lease. So the two addresses are usually free after you set the static IP on your machine, you just have to remember to do an "ipconfig /release" command just before setting your static IP address.
Overall the project was a huge success, the time it took to rollout a new branch was much less than any branch rollout I have ever done. I even created and tested a Ghost DVD for system restore purposes and it worked with flying colors. RIS is a really great product.
Here is one more guide to Remote OS Installation I found while working on this project.
I'm off to Waco to setup a new branch this week and train our tech support company from that regoin on how to roll out a branch to my new standards. Should be a fun few days.
Ok, if you are a regular reader, you might remember way, way back in 2003 I was in a Coma for a while.
At that time I had recently upgraded a bank to Windows 2000, and had setup Microsoft's Remote Installation Services (RIS) on one of their shiny new servers, complete with a separate Image Partition. We were supposed to roll out all new computers to the bank that year, and I was looking forward to working out RIS, and getting the PCs setup that way.
Then came the Coma, and I was out for a little over three months.
While I was out, all the systems got installed, but no one bothered with RIS.
Flash forward to 2006 and now the guy I worked for at that bank is my new boss.
I get to install RIS.
Ok, so I've got a junked Compaq DL380 server with 4 9.1 GB HDDs that I can use as a test bed. Ok, setup one drive for booting, the other three as a 18GB RAID 5. Loaded Windows 2003, patched, joined the domain. Loaded and configured RIS as per the following documents from Microsoft:
Step-by-Step Guide to Remote OS Installation
An old Windows 2000 White Paper on installing RIS that a friend sent to me and I can't find a link for any longer.
Ok, loaded RIS and ran the RIS setup with my handy dandy HP Windows XP SP2 CD-ROM with no problems.
Loaded my new HP system using their media and my Windows NT SIF setup floppy without issues. However, when I went to run RIPrep.exe, it failed out. E-mailed my buddy, I have to go and find the updated version of RIPrep.exe for Windows XP.
Still had issues, getting the image up to the server worked well, but pulling the image back fails with an issue that no network card driver for my hardware was present in my image.
Back to the research. So, I found this article How to Add OEM Plug and Play Drivers to Windows XP at Microsoft Support, and using the instructions to create the Drivers directory structure in the Root of C:, then creating the Sysprep directory and configuration file.
Now I could push the image up and pull the image down. I have a good base image for our current standardized system.
Next step, try it with the machine joined to the domain, fully patched and with Office 2003 installed.
Works great.
As a final step, we actually have four discreet banks, and some of the software is unique to each bank, so I created four more loads, each prepped for one of the banks we own.
To test this we rolled out a RIS imaged set of systems to a brand new bank. It worked great. The only issue we encountered was the need of a DHCP server at the site where we were working. To resolve this problem, I found a great piece of software called ipLease that is a little tricky to use, but a great DHCP server. I used it to create a 2 address scope with a 60 second lease. So the two addresses are usually free after you set the static IP on your machine, you just have to remember to do an "ipconfig /release" command just before setting your static IP address.
Overall the project was a huge success, the time it took to rollout a new branch was much less than any branch rollout I have ever done. I even created and tested a Ghost DVD for system restore purposes and it worked with flying colors. RIS is a really great product.
Here is one more guide to Remote OS Installation I found while working on this project.
I'm off to Waco to setup a new branch this week and train our tech support company from that regoin on how to roll out a branch to my new standards. Should be a fun few days.
Labels: coma, health, microsoft, ris
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