Hello fellow Unattended users, maybe I have just found the solution to all our Unattended woes.
We have been running Unattended for nearly two years, but we also gut stock in the recent problems with NTLDR Not Found, missing device drivers for Linux and so on. With the help of these sites http://www.promodus.net/linuxris http://oss.netfarm.it/guides/pxe.php I was finally able to set up a completely new Unattended system inside a virtual machine. Basically, it does something similar like the Microsoft Remote Installation Services (RIS) - it boots up the CD-ROM boot image via TFTP, copies some files. Then it detects the networking card via the BINL protocol. Up to now, there has not been a free version, but thanks to the great efforts of Gianluigi Tiesi (thanks so much!), there is one. :-) It takes normal device drivers. After that, it copies files from a Samba share and starts installing. The Unattend.txt file is being called Winnt.sif, but it is basically the same. Pros are, that we don't have to work with Linux anymore, it just causes so much pain when invoking the Windows setup via dosemu. We just use the normal Windows setup, so any device you get device drivers for Windows can be installed that way. This solution should work with 2000, XP and 2003. Vista does it completely different, but IIRC, Microsoft provides a free network install tool for it, haven't tested it yet, though. For software distribution, I use a free tool called WPKG, that works fine and can be installed via the cmdlines-feature of the Windows setup, so we don't need Unattended or Perl for that anymore. The only problem I found out so far is that getting machine data from LDAP or MySQL is not possible, at least not if you don't write your own TFTP server. But you can specify one SIF file per machine, so these files can be created by a nice script. I haven't tested it in our large network, but I think we finally found something that really works, even in the future. I will try to set up a website with detailed instructions in the future. Florian ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ unattended-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/unattended-devel
