[wpkg-users] Installs from start to finish....

[Troy Hamilton]

On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 12:58 AM, Berge Schwebs Bjørlo <berge at trivini.no> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 08:20:23PM -0400, Kevin Landers wrote:
> > I would be very interested in hearing your methods for such an installation
> > process.

> I'd be happy to put the source somewhere and write something about it
> English, since people seem interested, though. I probably won't have the time
> until after this weekend, but I'll keep you posted.
>
> [0] http://itk.samfundet.no/dok/suwi
>

Berge,

I too would be very interested in your linux/dosemu windows
installation system.  I tried the google translation of your Norwegian
documentation, but it didn't turn out too well.

The idea of a bare metal windows install plus applications install is
what got me interested in wpkg to start with.  I looked at
http://unattended.sf.net, but I wanted to use the same system for
upgrading and installing apps on production workstations that I used
for installing/deploying freshly installed workstations.  Wpkg fits
this role quite nicely, but I've still got to work out some kinks in
the process.


On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 3:55 PM, Adam Williams
<awilliam at mdah.state.ms.us> wrote:
> thats cool that you have a CD that installs everything you need, too bad I
> can't do that at my work, we have a dozen different kind of computers, a lot
> of people using different kinds of software, etc.

Actually, that is the precise reason that I wanted to replace our
current Ghost-based deployment process with an unattended windows
install process.  Instead of trying to keep one ghost image updated
for each workstation model, I just have the winxp install cd on a
network share along with the drivers for all workstations.  The
windows installer (winnt.exe or winnt32.exe) takes care of hardware
detection and driver selection, workstation naming, domain joining,
etc.  Then cmdlines.txt starts up wpkg after installation to install
and configure the applications.

For the windows install process, I originally went with MS RIS
(legacy, not WDS), but I abandoned it for two reasons: 1) the BINL
server required tracking down and installing text mode drivers for all
nics in addition to the regular drivers needed for winxp, and 2) RIS
is way too tightly integrated to Active Directory--if your schema
master or replication gets hosed up, the RIS server cannot determine
if it is "authorized" to start.  Next, I went to RIS-Linux, but it
still required separate text mode drivers.  Next, I tried to get
dosemu working with slax, but I gave up after a few attempts.

Currently I'm using winpe 2.0 (vistape) boot images created with the
Windows Automated Installation Toolkit.  I've got a cmd script
(originally from bootland, I think) that creates a pxe bootable image,
an iso, and usb bootable image.  After booting it up (usually via
pxe), I have an hta login screen that maps a network drive to the
winxp install media share and prepares an unattended.txt file with the
correct workstation name, OU, domain credentials, etc.  22 minutes
later, I've got a freshly installed workstation with wpkg installing
applications.

Even though the vistape system works OK, there are a few reasons that
I would abandon it for a linux/dosemu system.  First, vistape takes
about 2 minutes, 20 seconds to boot up and initialize the hardware.
I'm pretty sure I could shave that down to 30 seconds with linux.
Secondly, in my experience, linux has better out of the box support
for nics.  Right now, vistape has most drivers built in, but in a
couple years, I'm guessing that I'll have to inject more drivers into
the boot images.  Lastly, vistape makes it almost impossible to set
the nic to full duplex from the command line.  (Our switches are set
to 100full.)

One situation where vistape comes in handy, though, is that I can run
ghost32.exe from the network.  So after I've installed a new model of
workstation and let wpkg do its magic, I can pxe boot, take a ghost
image of the drive, and then mulicast it to an entire lab of computers
at once.

Cheers,

--Troy