Just Uber

One of the principle benefits of IT, in my opinion, is the ability to perform tasks whilst sitting on my backside which otherwise would require some kind of movement.

After deploying Service Pack 2 recently via WSUS, we had a couple of PCs brought back into the office which had decided to end their own lives rather than continue running Windows XP. Although I was of the opinion that this was not necessarily a bad thing, my boss disagreed and suggested we attempt to re-image them.

In a flash of inspiration my colleague ‘I heart ET’ suggested that we investigate remote deployment of Windows instead of re-ghosting them via multicast and Norton ghost. Always happy to make my life easier, I readily agree…..

The chosen open source Windows deployment system is aptly named Unattended.

Rather than use remote installation services, an open source solution was preferable because we liked the idea of being able to customise the application to our needs.

Unattended allows you to use a boot disk, cd-rom or network boot solution to connect the PC to a remote share and download the operating system, drivers and applications (although I’m not yet sure if we’ll mostly install our apps by group policy, but hey lets wing it…).

Unattended requires a DHCP server, a DNS server and a File server. As we’re running an Active Directory environment here, we’ll be using Windows Server 2003 to provide these services, although if it all goes pear shaped, there’s an Ubuntu samba server on standby to dish out the files….

There are four parts to Unattended, the Unattended server software itself, DOS and Linux bootdisks and support documentation so the first thing is to grab all of that…. Well it is free….

Preparing the Server

The Unattended server package (unattended-.zip) comes as a zip archive and needs to be unpacked to your file server. In this case we’re using a terrabyte storage device running server 2003 for our sins. Once unpacked a net share needs setting up to allow guest read access to the install folder. Execute the following code on a Windows file server to do that…

c:\> net share install=c:\path\to\unattended\install
c:\> cacls c:\path\to\unattended\install /T /E /G guest:R
c:\> net user guest /ACTIVE:YES /DOMAIN

Because of the way Unattended is setup, your server needs to be accessible via the name of “ntinstall”. In our case we needed to set up a canonical name on our DNS server to make this happen. If you’re using a Windows DNS server, simply select ‘New Alias (CNAME)’ when right clicking on the appropriate forward lookup zone.

In the Unattended documentation, it’s noted that there is a problem with accessing SMB shares on some Windows servers when using an Alias. Microsoft knowledge base has a workaround for this particular issue.

As sods law has it, I had exactly this issue with my server. What fun and games it is to edit the registry of the primary backup file server and restart it in the middle of the day - I love Windows…

If the server is set up properly now, you should be able to access \\ntinstall\install from a machidjgppne on your network and see the lots of nice Unattended stuff sitting there ready to do your bidding. Next step OS distribution point.

Operating System Distribution Point Setup

Rightho, first things first. Unattended needs certain parts of a collection of tools called DJGPP which are Unix tools for DOS. You’ll need to grab the following:

The basic development kit - djdev203.zip
The DPMI server - csdpmi5b.zip
The Perl port - perl561b.zip
The Pico text editor - pico396b.zip

You want all of these unzipped to \install\djgpp on the server we setup in the earlier step.

On to a slightly more exciting step. You can now copy your operating system files to your distribution server. Grab the I386 folder from your Windows installation disk, and put it into a folder signifying the contents (we called ours wintest, but it could be winxpsp2 or whatever) residing inside the os folder on your server. You should now have \install\os\wintest\I386

Fingers Crossed it Bloomin’ Works!

I got no joy booting from the Unattended DOS boot disk. It simply wouldn’t recognise the username and password I was giving it so I tried the Linux boot disk instead.

This is a lot slicker, automatically recognising the network card installed. Again, I had a username and password problem when mounting the SMB share so as a temporary workaround, I used by domain logon ie: domainname\username - This worked!

Unfortunately as is always the case with me, I hit another problem… Now the message “Invalid install share: //z/linuxaux directory not found.” is displayed in the gleeful manner in which error messages like to display themselves.

After a little digging, I established that I’d been following instructions for the DOS boot disk variation of Unattended. DONT PANIC though, the resolution to this issue isn’t that bad! Grab the linux bootdisk zip file from the Unattended site. Open it up and look in the install folder. Moooowahahahahahah!! There is the aforementioned linuxaux folder! Copy it to your \install folder. Let peace reign across the land.

That’s it, you should now be able to boot from the boot disk and start installing Windows from your remote server.

What Everything Else?

What! A man needs to rest you know! It’s Saturday shift and I haven’t even had a sleep yet!

Now you have your Unattended setup working, you will want to do some of the funky things that you can do with Unattended like application management and slip-streaming service packs.

But my typing fingers are tired for today, so I’ll direct you towards the Unattended website and wiki for further instructions. I might share some more of my adventures with Unattended as I learn how to use it, but that’s for another day

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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 2nd, 2006 at 1:53 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.