Jump to content

The best ZTI plan


Recommended Posts


It sounds like you need to impliment a mix of RIS and DFS. RIS will handle the installs and deployment of the OS, and DFS will ensure that all of your servers have the same images. I've actually never done this so I can't give any pointers. I know with DFS you can regulate when it sync's files, so you could configure it to only do that after-hours like you want. And your zombie clients would just need to know how to hit the F12 key. They will need to login, but you could make a generic account that only has permissions to run RIS.

This is exactly how we do it: two flat RIS CD images (one Windows 2000 and one XP), replicated to every RIS server, and a generic RIS-only account. Back in 2001 we used DFS replication (NTFRS - the same mechanism that replicates SYSVOL) to replicate our RIS sources, but this didn't always work well... A Microsoft consultant, when asked, told us that NTFRS wasn't really designed to handle the amount of replication traffic we were generating. So we switched to Robocopy "replication" instead. Somewhere along the road (in Windows 2000 SP3, if I remember correctly) Microsoft redesigned NTFRS, but by then we were happy with our Robocopy solution, so we never went back to using NTFRS. But it should be possible; I don't see any reason why SIS should be an issue there.

We turned to RIS instead of imaging mainly for ease of maintenance: adding a new driver or another update is a snap. No need for different images for different systems either: all clients install from the same source. Apart from that, what most people don't seem to realize is that you usually need an imaging software license for every computer that receives an image. This would mean we'd need a couple of thousand Ghost licenses, while RIS comes with Windows.

Because we need to support a number of languages, we have added several MUI's to our RIS sources. Lately our company has acquired another international company, meaning we will need to support two more languages in the near future. No problem: I just add two extra MUI's to the source and that's all; no need to rebuild images or anything. Another advantage: I need to distribute updates in one language only (English), because that's the underlying language of the Windows source.

It doesn't seem to point out SIS anywhere, so it looks like it might not be an issue? Of course it's also based on 2000 and not 2003, so maybe SIS is new to 2003 or something. I've never played with 2000 so I don't know.

Nope: SIS came with Windows 2000. But as I pointed out earlier, I don't see why it should be an issue.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...