RIS server pitfalls?

[Ron]

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.win2000.advanced_server (More info?)

I'm going to try and set up a RIS server for the first time and I was
wondering if anyone would care to share their experiences. Particularly any
problems they encountered or advice on things to watch for would be great.

Thanks.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.win2000.advanced_server (More info?)

Hi Ron,

As part of my revision for my mcse course, i set one up in my bedroom & it
went very smoothly indeed but that really isn't the problem.

When you come to deploy images using your RIS server, you MUST make sure you
have a nic that will support it. If not the whole exercise becomes veru
tricky, see replies to Annicka's question above, and despite all the reading
that I've done, I am now stuck on the actual deployment of images over my
network. I've had to invest in a nic that will support RIS just to check that
I'm getting that part of it right.

Best of luck & I would be most interested to hear how you get on.
Regards
Roly

"Ron" wrote:

> I'm going to try and set up a RIS server for the first time and I was
> wondering if anyone would care to share their experiences. Particularly any
> problems they encountered or advice on things to watch for would be great.
>
> Thanks.
>
>
>

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.win2000.advanced_server (More info?)

> Particularly any problems they encountered or advice on things to watch
for would be great.

Been through this experience and would say the following:

1. NICs - we buy mostly low spec Dells and the onboard NICs aren't PXE
compatible so we use 3rd party cards that have a supported Realtek chipset
which work fine - you have to boot from a CD or floppy though - once the PC
is configured you can take the extra NIC out and keep it as a spare.
The list of supported hardware that comes with Win2003 is a lot longer than
the Win 2K version so I'd recommend using 2003 server - alternatively you
can use the Win 2003 files to upgrade your Win2K server.

2. Hardware Abstract Layer (HAL) - some of our older PCs have a differend
HAL version to the newer ones so we built separate master & full images for
the different groups of machines.

3. Windows Versions when creating images. We create fully loaded versions
of our desktops - visual studio/office/the usual stuff - which we then
upload onto new PCs or rebuild the old ones as required. To do this you
need to have build a master OS image on the server first, then create your
master PC with all the software you want for the build, then create an image
of that. The problem we found here was that when we were creating the fully
loaded image, we were included the latest security patches, Service Packs
etc which would change the Windows version numbers, and therefore not allow
us to create an image of it. Our routine is now to build the fully loaded
PC using RIS, then apply all the patches/SPs that have appeared since the
version of the OS that we used to build the original image.

4. Hard Disk Space - RIS won't let you build a PC that has a Hard Drive
smaller than the one that the PC you used to create the image had, so when
making an image we use a PC with the smallest HDD possible.

Apart from this it's been pretty simple, and all the answers to this were
found in the usual helpful places ie MS Knowledge Base/Mastering Windows
Server 2003 (Mark Minasi et al)/www.JSIINC.com

cheers

Peter