jakal121 Posted January 31, 2019 Posted January 31, 2019 We run courses which require full admin access in our lab rooms so students are able to tinker on Server 2012 with a bunch of linux VM's baked into it Kali etc. Currently we reimage machines using Ghost which seems to be the fastest method for us (120GB images) in under an hour for 30 odd PC's However, this requires an engineer to be present. Keen to know what other viable methods exist out there, especially if there is a solution that doesn't require a body present (just to add deepfreeze type apps would become tedious as students could probably remove the app with admin access easily)
Katy Posted January 31, 2019 Posted January 31, 2019 Assuming your image is Windows with all the linux running as HyperV guests or similar: We don't have that kind of setup, but we re-image machines with SCCM and MDT. Task sequence which does the OS install and sets everything up, PCs are set to PXE boot as their default boot option. We then have a task assigned to an empty device collection (set to "Required", and only advertised to Media and PXE clients). To re-image a PC we stick it in the device collection and remotely power cycle the PC, it then PXE boots and is zero touch. If there's no task waiting then the PXE boot just fails and drops through to booting off the local disk.
jakal121 Posted January 31, 2019 Author Posted January 31, 2019 That would be fantastic for us...however we quite literally have each room isolated as students experiment with virus's etc, when we reimage, an engineer will quite literally connect the classroom switch to the ghost server (and disconnect Internet access)
Katy Posted January 31, 2019 Posted January 31, 2019 You could do the same and connect the classroom switch to the SCCM server, although that'd still require someone to go down there. Out of ideas, hopefully somebody else will have a similar scenario to yours and some good ideas
eddyc Posted February 1, 2019 Posted February 1, 2019 You could do the same and connect the classroom switch to the SCCM server, although that'd still require someone to go down there. Out of ideas, hopefully somebody else will have a similar scenario to yours and some good ideas Unless you keep all of the rooms connected and disable their uplinks at the core switch? Enable to port, kick off the reimage then disable the port when done?
jakal121 Posted February 1, 2019 Author Posted February 1, 2019 This may actually work, thanks Eddy - will have a think about it
TechMonkey Posted February 1, 2019 Posted February 1, 2019 One alternative would be Deep Freeze. I haven't looked at it in a long time but I seem to remember it used to be able to restore just by rebooting, I think it was a good image that it just reverted all files back to. Another alternative would be to make the VMs revertable, again not played with it in a while but you can set them to not keep changes so a reboot wipes them back to the image. Or take snapshots. That may not work though if they are able to mess up the Server infrastructure the VMs run on.
jakal121 Posted February 1, 2019 Author Posted February 1, 2019 Will look into revertable vm's, I knew about snapshots but didn't know they could be set to not retain changes! As for deepfreeze, since these machines are not on a domain and students have full admin rights, they could pretty much remove anything they want, including the deep freeze agent etc In an ideal situation it would be great if there was a solution that worked in the lines of... A deployment server of some sort hooked up directly to the classroom switch that can be enabled remotely...and then the engineer could potentially schedule a reboot and have the image dropped
TechMonkey Posted February 1, 2019 Posted February 1, 2019 Will look into revertable vm's, I knew about snapshots but didn't know they could be set to not retain changes! As for deepfreeze, since these machines are not on a domain and students have full admin rights, they could pretty much remove anything they want, including the deep freeze agent etc In an ideal situation it would be great if there was a solution that worked in the lines of... A deployment server of some sort hooked up directly to the classroom switch that can be enabled remotely...and then the engineer could potentially schedule a reboot and have the image dropped I would get in touch with Deep Freeze as they specifically market it for Computer Labs, to allow students to Provide students with unrestricted access to their computers while preventing permanent configuration changes with Reboot to Restore Technology. I'm sure they have a cloud server so the Engineer could do anything from anywhere or a local server stuck on a box in the corner that could do all the necessary. Just depends on the cost I guess.
kennysarmy Posted February 1, 2019 Posted February 1, 2019 Our students have a sandbox environment, Oracle Virtualbox with immutable disks so they can break it then reboot and all is back !
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