[wpkg-users] remotely installing Vista from Linux

[Rainer Meier]

Hi Florian,

Florian Effenberger wrote:
> Hello there,
> 
> might be a little bit off-topic, but I think we have real experts on
> this list, so I wanted to give it a try. ;-) Does anyone of you know
> how to remotely install Vista from Linux? With XP, I've made great
> experience with the free BINL server from
> http://oss.netfarm.it/guides/pxe.php, but for Vista, I'm out of luck.
> The RIS model changed to WDS, from what I know - I guess something
> like booting the PE image remotely should work. Any pointers you can
> give me would be great!

Yes, you name the problem already. The binl protocol has been 
disassembled and a binl server have been written by famous Gianluigi 
Tiesi (sherpya). Unfortunately I was not yet able to locate a free (OSS) 
WDS implementation which runs on Linux.


Personally I was able to boot WinPE 2.0 using PXE and TFTP-server (.WIM 
image). At the end of the boot process Vista seems to try to contact the 
WDS server by an unknown protocol which fails if there is no WDS server 
on the network.

Well, I intended to do some analysis of the packages and try to 
implement my own WDS server. I have found some information which makes 
me believe that Microsoft probably uses TCP/IP based XML transfer 
technologies to transfer information about available Windows images. 
These images are transferred using CIFS later on I guess. However I 
never found time to investigate here. There might be also a proprietary 
protocol used.

I also thought about a second possibility:
After WinPE is booted you can run a command prompt using Shift-F10 (as 
far as I remember). Here you could probably mount a CIFS share and then 
run Vista setup from that network share.
It might be possible to modify the WIM image of WinPE in order to mount 
the drive automatically and run the setup. As a result no WDS would be 
required at all. However this is just wild guess, I never managed to 
finish research here.

At the moment I still get mainly request to deploy Windows XP (which is 
anyway the best decision still I think). Here I also use a 
"sherpya"-based Linux-RIS server to set up the machines. In any case I 
still plan to investigate how to do unattended Vista deployment using 
Linux servers.


br,
Rainer