My ghost story.

I've recenly taken over a large secondry schools it deparment, well when i say taken over my commanty won the contract and after a new months i got dumped with the problem of over 400 systems and 1 me,

After looking at what we had. What end users were complaining about, mostly speed problems, turned out the NAS servers about had it, it turnes out we have Ghost installed on one of the 13 servers, but not the whole suite, with kinda sucks.

so pushing out new images onto the many diffrent systems was always going to be a pain in the ass. and then haveing to name them by hand and add them to the AD and move then into the corect OU, and becuse we uses a System Var. to control the printers, i would need to set that as well. And becuse the existing images are like 13GB incluseing software IE office 2003.

it was taking about 30 mins per system over 400+ system would take about over 200hr just to get eveything images, as a result most of the systems had a old broken image from 2006, that seemd to be devloping problems with some BROKEN MSI that a perviuse tech tryed to make him self.

i started looking about for a work around, tryed talking to the people i worked with see if they could suggest away to speed things up, all i got back was stop beening a lazzy as, then were beening payed for you to do eveything by hand then were happy,

dosent solve my problem. or even help for that matter,

first off i looked at my problem, i needed away to install a copy of Windows XP Vol, then config it to auto rename its self and add its self onto my domain,

as we all know evey pc has its own MAC address, so that seemed like a easy way to start from,

so i check out to see if i could harvist my existing computer names, what a suppirse none of the curent PC names dont have anything to do with were they are. in the school.

So i have to make note of the MAC, NEW HOSTNAME AND were ad AD i want them to go. as ive got to uses a Batch file i started with a text CSV layout. EG

00-13-72-CB-1B-12,LIB-12,LIB,

00-13-72-CB-1B-A3,LIB-06,LIB,

00-13-72-CA-F4-22,LIB-05,LIB,

00-13-72-CB-15-B7,LIB-04,LIB,

thats all fair and well but how to i do the look up??

FOR /F "tokens=1,2 delims=," %%G IN (%MAC_CONFING_FILE%) DO IF %%G == %MAC% SET NEW_HOSTNAME=%%H

FOR /F "tokens=1,3 delims=," %%G IN (%MAC_CONFING_FILE%) DO IF %%G == %MAC% SET NEW_OU=%%H

Useing a batch For can step thro text files one by one. Easy,

perfect, how to i change the name of the system, well thats not so easy, NetDom can do this once your on the domain, and says it can do it when your off domain but not for me..

so i used 3rd party problem from, i beleve it change a had full of reg entrys.

http://www.willowhayes.co.uk/

add to domain usesing NETDOM by MS,

cool, now what happens if i need to add something to my script after the image has been taken, becuse the verson of ghost i have a about 3 million years old <8? i cant exit images that are NTFS, so i used a prelaoders that mount a network drive so i can make changes at any point.

Simple, well, after 100+ lines of batch and colecting over a 400 Mac addresses, to be colected its taken abit more work than i wanted but saves my hrs, expectly when i have already indexed and have a problem with it, i can set it imagesing 15 mins later its renameing its self and adding its self to the domain, when its come round for the last time loges it self on and the GPUPDATES reboots pulls down office and other software, then its ready to be used again, now its a 10 min images job

i managed to get 50 system images in 1 half day, i even had change to have a 1 hrs sit down and cup of coffee,