Hello People, First off - thank you all for your hard work on creating unattended. We have used it in our animation department for the last three years and it has been great.
Unfortunately I've had to move on because of the boot disk issue. Not being a linux expert, I've tried many of the boot disks posted and even tried unsuccessfully to make my own. I just keep getting errors. So I had to find a solution that worked and upon some advice from threads here and from trolling msfn.org I have come up with the following solution. I'm posting it in case anyone here is like me a lurker who is looking for answers. The Background: We needed a system that is easy to manage and update, doesn't require an additional server (beyond DHCP) and could use the scripts we've already developed to deploy software. We are only running XP at this time. So consider this a very narrow solution unlike unattended :) Security isn't an issue during deployment for us since the labs/machines are installed when no-one is around. The Solution: We made a slipstremed universal XP boot disk using nlite (www.nliteos.com), RyanVM Updates (www.ryanvm.net) and Driverspacks.net. This gives us a slipstreamed boot cd that so far works on all of our machines (5 year old dells to three month old custom built pc's). The RyanVm updates slipstream many of the Microsoft Hotfixes and Crtical updates and a few others applications. We are slipstreaming WGA, Direct X9, WMP 11 and IE 7. When the bootdisk starts up we need to manually partition the drives. The bootdisk configures networking, some reg tweaks and sets the computer name to a random name. It also sets the administrator account to autologin. Winsit.inf runs a batch file from guirunonce that copies a modified mapznrun.bat to the administrator's startup folder. Upon Administrative Login, a modified mapznrun.bat runs (from the administrator startup folder for simplicity). The mapznrun.bat maps drive z: to \\server\install. Then runs z:\scripts\install.bat. That way the universal boot disk will install a slipstreamed windows xp silently and then run whatever we want from the server. The servers install.bat then takes over and installs the application software and system setup. The install.bat script doesn't use a stack approach like todo.txt but instead checks to see if apps and configurations have already been installed. This is done using 'if exist' statements in the batch files combined with writing .txt files to the c:\netinst folder for things that we couldn't easily test in batch files. Since this is not the complete picture, I've posted details on my website at http://www.cgfiles.com/tutorials/unattended/index.html Let me know if you have any questions or want more info. Next year if we're running vista I'll probably look for another solution again. (Seems to be a yearly occurance). Cheers, Craig _________________________ Craig Simmons Animation Coordinator Capilano College www.gradshow.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] 604-990-7854 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ unattended-info mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/unattended-info
