Recipe 2.6. Installing from Remote Installation Services (RIS)

Problem

You want to use a menu-based system to deploy Windows XP on systems without similar hardware (in other words, machines unsuitable for cloning).

Solution

You can use a feature of Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003, called Remote Installation Services (RIS), to deploy Windows images onto systems with varied hardware bases. Here's how.

RIS depends on the ability to network-boot your client computers and transfer the image to them. The process to do so depends somewhat on the client computer: some corporate-targeted PCs have options in the machine's BIOS to boot from the network, usually found in the area that determines the boot order of the storage devices. Other computers offer an option directly during the POST process to press F12 or some similar key to perform a network service boot (the Compaq Armada E550 I'm using to write this now uses the latter method, whereas the Dell Precision Workstation that is my main desktop computer uses F10).

However, some older computers and yes, some newer computers as well don't have the option to boot to the network in their BIOS or during POST. In this case, you'll need to use the RIS remote boot disk, mentioned earlier in this chapter as the saving grace for some machines. The Windows Server 2003 RIS disk supports 32 network adapters, all of which are PCI cards. If your Ethernet card is on that list, then RIS will work even if the machine doesn't directly support PXE, the Preboot eXecution Environment. To generate the network boot disk, navigate to the \RemoteInstall\Admin\i386 directory on your RIS server machine, and double-click on RBFG.EXE. It will prompt you to insert a disk which it will then format and reconstruct as the RIS remote boot disk.

On to actually performing the deployment: insert the boot floppy or select the option to boot from the network, which applies in your case. If you use the boot floppy, you will see a screen similar to the following:

Microsoft Windows Remote Installation Boot Floppy Copyright 2001 Lanworks Technologies Co., a subsidiary of 3Com Corporation All rights reserved. 3Com 3C90XB / 3C90XC Etherlink PCI Node: 00115A5E3E12 DHCP.... TFTP........... Press F12 for network service boot

During that process, no matter which method you use to activate the network boot, the computer contacts a DHCP server and requests an address. That address is sent in a packet, containing a pointer to a server that has files needed to continue to RIS boot process. These files are transferred using the TFTP protocol, a cousin of the commonly found FTP protocol. Once the boot files are transferred, the program prompts you to confirm that you want to boot from the network. Press F12 to confirm this, and the blue-screened, text-based Client Installation Wizard will appear. Then, follow these steps:

The first screen prompts you to enter your username, password, and account domain membership information. Do so, and then press Enter.

You'll now be asked whether you want to do an automatic or custom setup or if you'd like to restart a previous failed setup attempt. Automatic setups generate the computer name from a combination of your username and the computer's MAC address and set up an unattended installation with all the defaults. They can also retrieve existing data from Active Directory with regard to computer name and identification if you're redeploying a machine already in the directory. Custom setups allow you to define a specific computer name for each RIS installation whether or not the machine is already in the directory. Restarting a failed setup attempt is as functional as it is obvious.

When using the Custom Setup option, you will be expected to know the location in Active Directory that the computer account should be located. If you do not specify a location, the default [domainname.com]/Computers, the computer's organizational unit, will be the home of the newly deployed machine.

Then, confirm your selections, and press Enter. The installation will begin.

Discussion

If you're thinking of using RIS on your network, here are some things to keep in mind.

• All client machines must support the PXE boot feature somehow. This is the stickler here. PXE, or Pre-boot eXecution Environment, allows a computer's BIOS to hand off boot control to the Ethernet card installed on the computer. The Ethernet card searches for an authorized DHCP server, applies the address assigned by that server, and then launches a TFTP transfer client that downloads the necessary files to boot into the Client Installation Wizard the first step of a RIS installation. If your network card doesn't support PXE booting, then you can't get on the network and therefore can't take advantage of RIS. However, if you're the owner of one of around 20 specific models of network cards, you are in luck: Microsoft provides a network boot disk with takes care of the PXE logic for the network card, enabling you to use RIS on a machine that would otherwise not qualify. There have been many promises on the part of Microsoft to expand this boot disk's coverage of network cards claims of such modifications date back before the release of Windows 2000 but as of yet, there have been no additions.

• Laptops MUST be able to boot off the network. The aforementioned boot floppy works with only two PC Card-based Ethernet adapters and those are fairly old. So laptops that aren't the most recent will likely still need to be deployed manually, or at least without RIS. However, notebook manufacturers have begun to include built-in Ethernet connections using the miniPCI standard, and these are commonly PXE compliant. If it's time to reevaluate your baseline corporate laptop configuration, you would do well to ensure that your laptops are PXE compliant.

• RIS imaging, using either a scripted install or a flat image installation, can only handle the C drive. If you have a computer with multiple physical disks, RIS will only transfer an image of a C drive to a C drive, and nothing else. RIS will only build images of C drives, and it will only service C drives on the client side. This works similarly for partitions, although you should be careful about partitioning since RIS tends to reformat the entire hard disk, which will blow away your existing partitions as well. Either pay careful attention when performing RIS deployments to computers with many partitions, or use another scheme to organize your computers.

• You must have a separate partition or physical disk on the server to use for the RIS subsystem. RIS cannot cope with having Windows system files on the same volume where flat images and other images are located. This is mainly because of interactions between critical copies of active Windows system files and the Single Instance Storage Groveler service, or SIS, which allows one copy of one file to be placed on a disk, and links to be placed in all other locations on the disk where a copy of that file resided. It's like mail aliasing, in that small links to one copy of one file save space that would otherwise be wasted with multiple copies of the same file. Enterprises with eight different Server 2003 images available to RIS obviously have eight copies of many files. SIS reduces the disk space usage eight-fold.

Software requirements are a little less stringent than the hardware RIS needs. You must have a DHCP server on your network, and you must be conducting RIS deployments in an Active Directory-based domain. RIS cannot handle static IPs, mainly because the PXE protocol has no such provision for them. RIS also uses DHCP as a mechanism to control the entry of unauthorized RIS servers to your network: before a RIS server can be used for deployments, it must be authorized within the Active Directory.

See Also

Chapter 2, Learning Windows Server 2003 (O'Reilly), MS KB 304314, "How to Deploy Windows XP Images from Windows 2000 RIS Servers," and MS KB 891275, "How to Set Up, Configure, and Use Remote Installation Services in Windows 2000"