Waldemar Schlackow

There are many ways of deploying Windows nowadays. Most common ones are probably unattended CD installations and RIS/WDS deployments. However, the guys at http://unattended.sf.net came up with an ingenious idea of deploying Windows through a PXE/netboot Linux.

You might ask why this is useful? Well, in Windows all the hardware drivers are scattered across the net, as soon as you need a new network driver, you need to find it, and add RIS support for it. In Linux, all the usual drivers are in the kernel. So unattended boots up Linux, asks you a few questions (which can be automated), and then copies a windows distribution to the harddrive (either using DOSEMU and the Windows installer, or in the upcoming version using a custom nt5x-install). That distribution is then installed by Windows after a reboot (and it's ingenious procedure of converting FAT32 to NTFS).

This is not all that unattended has to offer. The Windows version you are installing can be easily customised. We used nLite to slipstream XP SP3 into it and then Driverpacks BASE from http://driverpacks.net/ to slipstream all current drivers into the installation. No more custom configurations! All the drivers are picked up automatically on install. To get driverpacks to work with unattended, I needed to:

* move /OEM to /I386/$oem$/$1
* move /I386/presetup.cmd and <winsource>/I386/setuporg.exe to /I386/$oem$/$$/System32
* add the following section to unattend.txt

[geshifilter-code] [GUIRunOnce] command9 = "%SystemDrive%\DPsFnshr.exe" [/geshifilter-code]
(alternatively that command can go into one of the postinstall scripts).

After that unattended has a huge amount of scripts prepared, which install software for you in silent/unattended mode. If it is Open/free software then these scripts actually even contain a URL, and they supply a parsed which downloads all this software for you. It is incredibly easy to use.

Since we are using a Windows domain, I was not able to get the postinstall to work, if Windows joined the domain at install-level. Instead I have used netdom.exe from the Windows Support Tools to join the domain after everything else has run. Our script looks like this:

joindomain.bat
[geshifilter-code] @Echo Off if exist c:\netinst\tempcred.bat call c:\netinst\tempcred.bat "C:\Program Files\Support Tools\netdom.exe" JOIN %ComputerName% /Domain:maths.ox.ac.uk /OU:"ou=Workstations-new,dc=maths,dc=ox,dc=ac,dc=uk" /UserD:%Z_USER% /PasswordD:%Z_PASS% [/geshifilter-code]

That makes it possible to give the user which is mounting the install the privilege to add workstations to the domain, and so only one password is needed for the whole install.

Another custom script, that I have written and which turned out quite handy is to adjust the workstation resolution to the available maximum (using a free tool supplied by the people at 12noon)

reschange.bat
[geshifilter-code] :: OPTIONAL: Change resolution to max :: URL|ALL|http://www.12noon.com/files/reschangecon.exe|packages/reschangecon/reschangecon.exe @Echo Off todo.pl "%Z%\packages\reschangecon\reschangecon.exe -width=max -height=max -depth=max -refresh=max" [/geshifilter-code]

After doing that, our Windows install has become a one-click installation, which can be invoked from the same PXE menu as our Linux installation (which would not have been possible if we used RIS). It is an incredibly simple and transparent deployment solution. The only problem which I see at the moment is, that even though we will not migrate to Vista for a while, at some point we will probably have no choice. However, as it stands, Vista cannot be installed through unattended, and I haven't found anything that suggests that somebody is working on it. The Vista installer is very different to the previous ones (currently only possible through WinPE), and that might cause some headache. I am not too worried about this at present, as the unattended guys, will probably come up with something, they are doing a great job. The application deployment, at least, does work with Vista.