|
Hey everybody, I’m a new subscriber on this board -- I’ve
been using unattended for a few months now handling many of our deployments at
my company, a systems integrator. We have a Linux server for deployments via
PXE. It is set up so every time we build a certain type of machine, I have to
manually select which unattend.txt, driver tree, and TEXTMODE folder to use. This
is a major pain, especially when we’re doing lots of different types of
machines at the same time; presently I have to wait until the initial textmode
is over to switch. I want to set it up to where I can select a number of different deployments
for a number of different machine types without all this manual nonsense. I don’t
have the convenience of knowing MAC addresses and such for these machines. Ideally
I’d like to have a menu come up during the unattended boot that looks something
like: “Win2K Pro (Basic)” “Win2K Pro (Customer Configuration A)” “Win2K Pro (Customer Configuration B)” “WinXP Pro (Basic)” Etc… I believe a MySQL database might be what I’m looking for, but the
unattend.csv example database is hardly self-explanatory and that’s the
only guide I have for setting up the database. If a MySQL database is what I’m
really looking for, I need a clearer explanation of how to populate the values.
The “lookup” field confuses me most – is this supposed to be
a MAC address or some kind of machine identifier based on previously-set values?
Citing the example “.csv” file, am I to understand that a Lookup
value of “000802C347BF” is the same as “computer2” is
the same as “Computer User 2”? This is confusing to me and
disheartening because I can’t know MAC addresses beforehand. I know there’s probably a way to set this up where I have
multiple folders under OS, like “w2ksp4A” and “w2ksp4B”
but that’s ugly and eats up disk space quickly. But if that’s the
only way to do what I’m trying to do, I’d like to know how I can
implement this. The only other way I know is to force it to behave this way is
to have dozens of unattended shares and the same number of entries in my PXE
boot menu, which is even nastier than the previous situation. -Jimmy |
