My last post mentioned that we were trialling FOG as a distribution server. We did that and now are trialling WDS - it hasn't been a smooth journey.

If you read the last blog I mentioned that our RIS server broke so we were looking for another method of deploying Windows XP across the school. Our LEA don't support Vista so we have been XP for a while and will be for some time.

In my 3 year plan I want (eventually) to move the school over to Windows 7 so I wanted a deployment server that would let me do this. Most (if not all schools in the LEA) use WDS or RIS - nobody I know of used Fog so I felt I could call on the expertise of the technicians in the LEA who had experience using WDS on the County Domain.

So I set about installing Windows 2003 R2 and then WDS. It all went smoothely - the install. We couldn't authorize the server in DHCP so the LEA had to do that. Not sure why because we are Domain Admins on our part of the network. Anyway it seems like we needed to be Enterprise Admins. This has now been changed and permissions given for future stuff.

So authorising the server happened and I followed instructions to get a PE image and a boot.wim file in there. I made the capture images and everything looked good. So I went on to create a capture image - amazing I thought - this is easy. Installing software took some time but it was done and I was happy with what would be called the Non CS3 Universal Image (I followed some instructions to make it Universal). MySysPrep was downloaded as were the driver packs. Image taken!!! Happy me.

Deploying was a different kettle of fish. Booting in the deploy part was good as was authenticating to the domain. But.... 'No Images Found' was the message given. The LEA looked, I looked and reinstalled - nothing was working.

I looked at the prestaging stuff and got error messages about our WDS server not being a Remote Installation Server. Weird stuff. Posted on here and got some help - but the error still remained.

The LEA then turned around and said - why not move our DHCP to a Windows 2008 server and put WDS on the same server. Fine by me. All done.

Lo and behold - everything (almost) now works. We have our first ever Win2008 Standard server installed as a member server with DHCP and WDS. It looks good - I like it. It's not R2 and the server is not 64bit but it is a dual quad core Dell PowerEdge 2950 rack with 4Gb of RAM. Over kill? It was going spare!

The test image showed up (for some reason twice) in the deployment screen and I managed to re-image a machine. I now need to tweak the sysprep configuration file to make sure that works properly.

The pre-staging still isn't working and for some reason the AD is not seeing this as a remote installation server even though when we search for it in the machine properties window (in AD) we can see it. Stumped with that one. Any ideas?

So there we are - I think we will be sticking with WDS for now and working through the issues whilst I build images.

Your comments on this are welcome. Thank to everyone who has offered advice on the way - Edugeek truly is the place to be for technical knowledge. Is there anywhere else like it? (For free?) I don't think so.

GJE