Month: April 2007

A few weeks ago I wrote about some strange things we had seen occurring with mandatory profiles. We had twice witnessed the scenario of an improperly configured mandatory profile causing user policies to fail or terminate prematurely. Naturally, I concluded this must be a scenario specific to man profiles. Well, I was wrong. Today I…

Many NZ schools get major software through the deals done by the Ministry of Education with suppliers like Microsoft, Apple and Novell. This year, the agreements were up for renewal. MOE has now announced that the packages available to schools have been finalised. The major change in the Microsoft licensing is the introduction of Windows Vista…

One of the great things that RIS does much better than Ghost for image installations is that it allows the computer account to be prestaged in Active Directory. Basically, the PXE specification provides for each computer to have its own unique GUID. This is transmitted in the DHCP Discover packet and is used to identity…

For the first test, I simply used the image that I created, as-is, on another, identical machine. The following issues have occurred: Mini-setup asked me for the name (not the organisation) to register under. Mini-setup asked me for the PID key. The setup formatted the entire HDD for C:, not a 20GB partition as the source computer…

Last time I discussed some background to RIS and preparation for imaging a machine. Now it’s time to take a look at the process of RIPREPping itself. We require custom network and other drivers loaded in the image, so I need to follow the process described in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314479 to enable these to be included in my image.…

Remote Install Services is a great replacement for Ghost, which is something we grew up with from our non-AD environment. RIS, like everything, has a learning curve, but it is easier to set up machines and you don’t need to buy extra software and licenses as it is built into Windows Server. RIPREP is the RIS…

A bit more information about the environmental background to this blog being set up and written will help you to understand why the blog exists and the subject material that it will cover. I have extensive computing experience and vocational qualifications specifically related to programming. However in recent years my work focus has shifted to…

When you create a basic RIS image, it comes with just the drivers that Windows supplies. To get even a flat image installed on a bare machine, you may find extra network card drivers are needed so that Windows can connect to the network and download the files it needs to install Windows. For a flat / Risetup image…

Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 upgrades the RIS server, if you have one, to Windows Deployment Services. WDS can run in a legacy mode for backward compatibility with RIS – it is normally set up as a mixed environment to allow both to run. WDS is the new technology for deploying images that is…

Mandatory profiles are something that came in from NT4 or earlier. They are a great way of working around limits of the Windows profile model. If you have a few hundred users who don’t need a customisable profile or to save profile settings, a man profile provides a great way of setting up users with…