Remote Installation Services (RIS)

[ChrisH]

I have no idea on details of the groveler service I just know what its supposed to do I have never really checked space as I dont use riprep therefore I onl have a couple of flar images so they dont take up much room. My installs are all automated.

[ajbritton]

I have had RIS servers with up to 8 or 9 seperate RIS builds, and the total disk space in use has never risen above 1Gb.

[GrumbleDook]

We have 16 seperate builds and it is close to 240 Gig ... but that is because we have complete builds with all software installed, and a seperate image for each room or model of machine.

 

This is only done to allow for the fact that we have some softare that seriously does not like being made into packages ... and the same software dislikes having other software being put on via MSIs afterwards ... it has also made life easier when tracking down some application issues ...

 

I know it is not what you are *meant* to do ... but it works for us. As we find software that is ok to deploy via GPO without cocking anything else up then we do it like that ...

[HodgeHi]

Hello,

 

I have just run into a problem with a HDD not being found. I then did a little googling to find that a similar issue was found on a dell when using a restore cd.

 

It was down to the drive being a sata drive. Now the issue is that the laptop don't come with a floppy drive, but that does not matter. Apparently when the laptop comes with a sata drive, in the BIOS there is a setting that is set to ACHPI or something like that which seems to cause a problem with RIS as well. I set this to compatible and the RIS ran fine.

 

This is on a new dual core IBM/Lenovo thinkpad R60e.

 

Just something i ran into today.

[Teth]

I'm building a new image for some new Media studies PCs. They have 80GB HDs and I want users in upper school (GCES and A-level) classes to be able to work locally on the drives. I figured the easiest way would be to partition the drive say 20/60 and have the 60 GB partition only show up for apropriate year groups with GP. Great in theory works on my test machine but then I set about getting the image ready to be deployed by RIS to the other 23 machines and suddenly we have a problem.

 

RIS either takes the whole drive for C or asks you to input partitioning info yourself. What I want is to be able to create 2 partitions with the install or at least create a 20gb partition for the OS and then create a second volume later with a firstrun script. Anyone know how to define partitions in the .sif my experiments with the instructions in deploy.cab have yeilded poor results.

[ChrisH]

I dont think it can be soen ahs been discussed before. You will need to do it after install with the appropriate tools.

[NetworkGeezer]

..or

 

You can PXE boot to WinPE and run a script which formarts/partitions the harddrive and then does an normal unattended clean install with the repartitioning flag turned to off.

 

N.B As well as being fiddly this 'solution' only works with RIS on Windows Server 2003 and where the clients have 256+MB RAM.

[ChrisH]

..or

 

You can PXE boot to WinPE and run a script which formarts/partitions the harddrive and then does an normal unattended clean install with the repartitioning flag turned to off.

 

N.B As well as being fiddly this 'solution' only works with RIS on Windows Server 2003 and where the clients have 256+MB RAM.

 

... and if they only have 256 make sure they dont have shared graphics memory. Been stung by that one before

[Uraken]

a quick question, my ris refuses to play at work, (i have it working at home so i have the fundamental knowledge to get it set up) pxe is ok but does not get past dhcp message, i have a dhcp server but not on my ris server does this make a difference or will pxe lok for any dhcp server?

[john]

You need to authorise your RIS box as a DHCP server, you don't need to do anything but authorise it in your main DHCP screen. Does your box have more than one network connection if it does that will be the problem, disable one and see if that solves it.

[Uraken]

Thanks john i had dhcp server installed but non-fuctional pxe and ris automatically search for local dhcp if it finds one it looks no further but my dhcp server was on another server so i removed the non-operational one and bingo.

[SOSAGES]

i used RIS a few years ago its very nice.

 

I assume most people use it every term to format / reinstall at the start of the summer hols ready for the next bunch of students to try and break the machines

[Enzomatrx]

Quick question:

 

Can RIS images be stored and deployed from an external USB hard drive?

Would it be as simple as mounting the \REMINST share on the server to the external drive?

 

We're out of room on our partition for images and we're thinking just throwing in some external 300GB drives will be easier than anything.

 

Thanks for any help.

[eean]

Don't see why not. USB hard drives are seen by windows as the same as normal hard drives.

[mac_shinobi]

Might be a little bit slower as the USB 2 hard drives have the USB 2 bottle neck compared to how fast the SCSI hard drives are on the server.

 

Might be better off getting a nas with a few hundred gigs on it ie a 500gb lacie NAS or something like that and shoving that on a gigabit port and doing it that way ?

[leletto]

Hi,

 

I need some help with RIS. What is the parameter for the .sif for chanhing the autoformat option?

 

I often reinstall my customers computer that asks me to leave his files on the pc. So I use a Pe enviroment to create a folder in C drive named Backup, then I move all the contents of the C drive in this backup folder. After that I reboot and start installing windows from the original windows CD and it ask me to leave the filesystem intacts. When the installation is finished the content of the C drive is the 3 windows folder ( windows, programs, docs & settings ) and my Backup folder.

With this method I didn't need to use an external drive for backing up the customers files.

 

Now I've builded up a PXE server for remote installation, following some guide here and there...But, when I boot from PXE network, windows setup didn't ask me to keep the filesystem but start formatting the drive as soon as I press the enter key.

 

Did I forgot some Unattended parameters or something like that?