The Best Unnatended installation remote system

[sunice]

Hi All,

Please do not blame me for not looking for an answer on the forum first, because I do not know what to look for. Basically i would like to develop the best unattended install system possible using the following scenario:

1. I have a TFTP\PXE server (need to determine what to use) , either MS WDS or TFTPD32 or perhaps some linux based solution.

2. Client boots to my server and registers itself waiting for a command to accept

3. On my server, I assign an installation to a particular client (32 bit,64 bit, etc) since I have MAC addresses list on a paper.

4. I run a remote command on a client and tell it to invoke a custom written unnatended.txt file with winnt32.exe(http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/a7bfbba3-92dc-486f-9138-55763711d9bb1033.mspx?mfr=true)

Currently I am looking for the following:

1. Server solution, that accepts clients that are network boot enabled, I do not like WDS/RIS since it requires an Active directory and I do not want to broadcast a new domain on my network and would like not to maintain AD objects

2. Client boot. I am not familiar with TFTP or PXE boots that much, thus I am not really sure what to use. Ideally I would use either something similar to a boot floppy with rcmd enabled. Indeed, all i need is just to map a drive to a share and execute win32. Also I was thinking about something like bart PE with remote software enabled. It would be nice to control a client with GUI remote software (VNC, rdp, radmin) that replaces a need of any KVM solution.

3. I would like to stay away from image based installation, since it may fail on a different HAL. Thus, I think unattended would be the best.

4. I am thinking of web interface that would allow me to setup credentials for future installation, but this is for the future

All of above would give me an ability to manage remote installations from a single server.