How do I remotely install windows 50 times?

December 15, 2006 12:29 PM

How do I remotely install a Windows xp based disc image to ~50 PC's at the same time?

Here's the situation: I need to be able to install ~50 or so PC's with a working XP system, customized to our needs (that is, installed with Office and other productivity software). The current process is creating a disc image, burning to CD, and then imaging each computer separately. This is, shall we say...inexpedient.

Good: University computer lab, all the bandwidth we need. Uniform systems, all exactly alike.

Bad: each system will have to have a unique identifier (computer name) for the network, and will have to be able to be customized for printing. Bonus points if the system will let us also do THIS remotely.

Even more bonus points for free/libre software.

posted by griffey to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Well, the normal way is to use RIS - Remote Installation Services. You create the RIS image, (or possibly multiple to deal with HAL issues if the PC's have different hardware, and then PXE boot the machines.

You will have to go to each machine to start the install process by (usually) hitting F12 to PXE boot them, but it is a fairly quick and painless method of installing a number of machines.
posted by stovenator at 12:35 PM on December 15, 2006

And you can uniquely name them all automatically using sysprep.
posted by Mwongozi at 12:40 PM on December 15, 2006

Ghost enterprise does all this and more. It's what I use (600+ computers, half a dozen configurations, 20 odd labs).

Once you have the Ghost client installed on the machines you can image a lab without leaving your chair.
posted by Mitheral at 12:43 PM on December 15, 2006

Yeah, don't get hung up on the "free" bit, you want Symantec Ghost.
posted by krisjohn at 3:01 PM on December 15, 2006

Out of curiosity, what is your university's directory service? Active Directory? eDirectory? Something else altogether?

While it's by no means free, I'm using Novell ZENworks to handle all this across multiple sites and thousands of machines. Imaging is only a very small part of what Zen does, but it's an excellent fit for a university environment if you're using eDirectory.
posted by JaredSeth at 3:03 PM on December 15, 2006

There are basically two ways to accomplish this; 1) use a remote installation system (examples include Unattended and RIS from Microsoft, or 2) create an image from one golden master machine and clone that image out to the rest (examples include Acronis TrueImage and Altiris Deployment solution. There are of course benefits of each.

For a computer lab running Windows, my personal preference is an image based solution (this assumes that you have a volume license key and don't need to activate each copy of Office and Windows). Set aside one machine to be the master image that you make all of your changes to. Once it is setup as you like, you run sysprep on the system (which allows the Windows setup wizard to rerun upon next reboot) and than copy the entire hard drive to the server. From there, you distribute this image out to all the other machines, and when they first boot, they run through the simplified setup process (defined by the settings of sysprep) that asks the relevant local questsion (for example the name of the machine). You than need to go about some other automated way to handle the final special customizations for each machine.

How you distribute the images to all of those machines will vary depending on what product you use. most will offer options to create a special boot floppy/cd. Some can install a special boot partion on the hard drive of every computer (you do this part by hand most likely). Some will also allow you to use PXE (booting from a network server) to do this. (Altiris does all of these options)

The process of doing those last minute customizations is where the various software packages really shine or fail. Some (such as Altiris (I am not saying it's the best package, it's just the one I used extensively over the course of three years running a computer lab in a university)) install a client on the master image, and the client can do all sorts of customization and automation on each machine.


It is possible to roll your own solution for all of this with free software. I used PartImage along with a custom PXE booting Knoppix setup to do the imaging. I than used ssh (I installed the cygwin ssh server on the master image) to run scripts on all of the machines to do further customizations. I will note that this only lasted a few months before I began using Altiris's Deployment solution. As cool as building it myself was, my todo list was waaay to long to justify the time that system took.

I can't speak much to the automated install systems like RIS as I have not used them much.
posted by fief at 4:27 PM on December 15, 2006

I've used Ghost 4 Unix (G4U) with a lot of success. It's not as robust as Symantec Ghost, but it's free and easy to use. Set up a master image PC with all of your software and configurations, run sysprep with the option to shut down the PC. Boot up to a G4U CD (or floppy) and send the image up to an FTP server. Boot up the other PCs to a G4U disc and pull the image down. However, you will still have to touch the machines to start the imaging and to name them and join the domain afterwards. We have a single tech image a lab of 30 PCs in a day with only about 2 hours of actual "hands on" time. Pulling down the image is so easy we sometimes use non-technical volunteers to do it. We create an account for them with enough permission to join PCs to the domain. Using the mini-setup wizard in sysprep, you can configure the PC to log in as local admin X amount of times so our volunteers don't even need the local admin password if we plan it correctly.

For the record, we use Altiris now but it's very expensive and difficult to set up. I wouldn't think it would be worth the trouble and expense for only 50 PCs.
posted by bda1972 at 10:29 PM on December 15, 2006