Question...for network guru's

[King X13]

Right now i have about 800 machines under my control, a new building is being built in which there will be another 150 machines in there.

I set up all my machines using norton ghost, i have 9 different machine types so it get tedious when i have to install new software across all the systems.

I work In House on one site, and get called to other sites as needed to set up systems,networks etc. While setting up systems for this one company all i needed to do was patch all the systems into the switch, and when i booted the machines and Dos prompt would appear and a batch file would run by itself and every program that system needed was installed automatically.

This is a much easier process by far. can someone tell me a way of going about this? or if you have a link of this process.

 

[Ste]

The BIOS needs to have an option called network boot, or boot by network. Something like that. Then a server needs to be setup with the images to which the machines would boot from and run the installation image.

How Specifically to do this, No clue. But I know it has something to do with a network boot.

lol

 

[King X13]

lol this i would assume but thanks for 7% of the solution lol. anyone know the other 93% i need to do this.

 

[Ste]

It would help if you posted the available servers, their specs and the Network boot capabilities of the computers you want to do it on.

 

[King X13]

that really doesnt have to do much with the procedure does it? but heres the specs:

5 servers

dual Xeon 2.20ghz
2 gig memory
5 scsi drives in raid5 totaling 210 gigs

each with those specs.

my client systems have network boot capability.

but im just wonder what i have to do to create this type of self install. with norton ghost every client has to be model number specific or the image fails. with this method it doesnt matter, leaving it to be a million hour time saver.

 

[killians45]

Just use a RIS and/or application server. Simple as that.

 

[mBernhardt]

Do you need a way to get fresh installs or to install applications over the network? (or both)

For the former, RIS (as killians25 suggested) might be your best choice.

For the later I would look into some sort of software management system. My company uses Novell at the moment. (Not for much longer! ) I can't remember the names of any previous ones I've used. They can be very helpful in the long run, although they'll require some work to get up and running.

 

[King X13]

ok thanks, anyone have a good links so i can brush up on your suggestions.

thanks again for the input.

 

[bla!!]

There are quite a few different flavors of software management.

Microsoft has one called SMS
My company uses Altiris Deployment Services

The network boot you experienced was a PXE boot. To do this you need to set up a PXE server that the clients will connect to. When the client boots to the network, it will ask for an IP address (via DHCP request). As longs as the PXE server is on the same subnet as the DHCP server, it will piggy-back a PXE response onto the DHCP response telling the client where to look for it's boot partition (specifically the IP of the PXE server). From there it depends on your boot partitions.

Doing this is a bit of an undertaking, and the PXE server has to be on the subnet where the machine is being booted from (or if you want to get technical, it can be on a different subnet, but the switches have to re-transmit the DHCP request broadcasts).

Google around for PXE booting. Altiris's website has a good white-paper on their PXE boot process. www.altiris.com