Imaging by mac address

[agarabaghi]

Couple questions...

 

I have a rules file that I load into the properties of my MDT sequence when we image our labs.

 

This still involves some basic touching of the computers. Mainly:

 

1) Setting up the physical machine

2) Booting off the LAN pxe into MDT

3) Adding a computer name (we organize our labs by roomname_number)

4) Adding it the Schoolname.edu domain, and the proper OU

5) Clicking begin

 

Once they are reimaged I can take full control of the machines via DeepFreeze, and soon SCCM.

 

So here are my questions:

 

1) Is there a way to add the Computer name field into the Properties / Rules tab in MDT so that it does LABNAME_"next number" so for example machine 1 will be CSS_01, while machine 2 will be CSS_02... etc....

 

2) Is there a way to add the domain and OU to the rules tab?

 

3) Am im still doing too much manual work in the sense of imaging these labs?

[SYNACK]

If you have SCCM you can setup zerotouch where you get the manufacturer to send you a list of MAC addresses and set the BIOS/EFI to PXE boot then just add them into SCCM and have the image applied when they first boot on your network. At that point it is just a case of plugging them in and powering them on, SCCM should be able to handle the rest.

[free780]

In mdt I'm not sure about the sequential numbering. Though you can have a db which has the mac addresses and guids so you can allocate computer names. You can easily add the join domain and ou to customsettings.ini .

[agarabaghi]

We have yet to combine SCCM and our MDT / WDS deployments. How hard is that to do?

 

We have SCCM running on a VM, and it is avle to push clients out and im able to use to software center to distribute apps to machines with it. But what about the imaging side? Is there a guide on bringing them togther?