> Hmmm... I don't think it was a bizarre thing for the > developers to assume you'd have access to the dns config of > your own shop. I think this is a case where you have special > needs that they may not have addressed. But see below...
Other issues aside, I wanted to address the notion of what is and what is not a "special need". I've noticed that many of the people commenting here are managing or employed at educational institution IT departments. In my experience, IT departments in such environments tend to be short on cash but (relatively) long on administrator man-hours, and their computing environments are not tightly controlled. In such environments, the default asumptions in Unattended may be perfectly adequate. But automated software deployments are at their most cost-effective when you have large-scale networks. The majority of large-scale NT networks are in private industry, where exactly the opposite tends to be true: there's often budget money to be had, but administrator man-hours ae short, and the environment tends to be tightly controlled and required to adhere to rigid standards (ISO, anyone?). If we could get an accurate count of NT networks containing, say, 100 workstations or more worldwide, I'd be willing to bet rather a lot of money that networks where my set of "special needs" exist far, far outnumber networks where the default assumptions of Unattended are effective. In particular, any organization making serious use of Active Directory is either going to have either a) their DNS config under strict change control, or b) problems. As far as the boot CD goes - well, Unattended is a largely Microsoft-based system for the automated install of Microsoft software across Microsoft-protocol networks. I don't think it's at all unusual to assume that such an environment will *not* have a handy Linux box for the purpose of building ISO images. It is not hard to create a simple batch file that uses a Win32 port of mkisofs to create a new boot CD on a Windows system (I've done this and I will submit it as a patch once I've got it debugged and a bit more robust), and IMHO this should have been included in the release once the decision to deprecate the boot floppies in favour of the Linux CD was made. Chris Doherty Helpdesk Analyst Crompton Co./Cie a Chemtura Company Elmira: (519) 669-1671 x319 ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: Tame your development challenges with Apache's Geronimo App Server. Download it for free - -and be entered to win a 42" plasma tv or your very own Sony(tm)PSP. Click here to play: http://sourceforge.net/geronimo.php _______________________________________________ unattended-info mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/unattended-info
