Quick effective imaging...

[SimpleSi]

@chrbb

You might want to look into using WPKG to automate deploying your Autoit scripts - its a great combination (with AutoIt) for doing things like upgrading all machines with a new version of a piece of software

 

regards

 

Simon

[RobD]

RIS Plus AutoImage means thousands of drivers in one install!! Works well!

[Oakie]

Ghost for Linux and / or Ghost for linux will not really make you happy in a school environment. It's unicasting and as such, is not suitable for imaging multiple clients at once. Eats bandwidth for breakfast lunch and dinner. Images the whole drive, bit by bit and can be slow with today's bigger drives. If you are looking for a ghost alternative that multicasts, look into a progam called "imagecast" by Phoenix (the bios people). I tried it and liked it.

[ctbjs]

Has anyone tried the Microsoft Business Desktop Deployment solution with regards to this yet?

[srochford]

Playing with MS BDD (try googling for BDD - you won't find much about Microsoft but you'll find some wacky stuff!) but not actually achieved anything with it.

 

Have just started using Windows Deployment Services (new with SP2 for 2003 Server) and ImageX and love it - images are smaller than Ghost images and the command line switches are easier to understand :-)

 

Not good for multicasting (as far as I know) but great for one offs.

[Dos_Box]

If you are looking for a ghost alternative that multicasts, look into a progam called "imagecast" by Phoenix (the bios people). I tried it and liked it.

 

I am a big RIS\WDS advocate, but I used to like Imagecast. They hadn't updated it in years though, which is why I moved onto RIS which was far friendlier, and multicast very well. I have noticed that they have updated it now though, but they don't push it like they used too.

[Guest drewinc]

We use Ghost here and it works perfect for us. We use a pxe boot menu to load new machines into the console / our current machines have the ghost client installed. We can do any amount of machines at once using multitask (i think we have done a batch of 75 before). We have all our tasks already setup so imaging machines are as simple as executing the task on the console.

 

Have never used RIS , maybe ill take a look at it sometime.

[Geoff]

Ghost for Linux and / or Ghost for linux will not really make you happy in a school environment. It's unicasting and as such, is not suitable for imaging multiple clients at once.

 

You can use a Multi cast aware FTP client/server to alleviate this.