Running RIS Remotely

[Zoom7000]

Is it possible to make a computer run RIS from a central location? E.g. At the moment, to rebuild a machine using RIS, you need to boot up the machine, press F12 to boot in from the network, enter Admin credentials, pick the image and press Enter twice.

Is there any way to automate this so that you can rebuild computers from a centrally managed location rather than having to physically visit each machine?

Zoom7000

[bountgunner]

The F12 is easy.

Go to "remoteinstall\OSChooser\i386" and delete the "startcom.com" and rename "startrom.n12" to "startrom.com".

[cluberti]

As to getting images installed automagically once they've booted up, you'll need to prestage the client machine accounts in RIS, and specify an image for each computer account.

[Zoom7000]

As to getting images installed automagically once they've booted up, you'll need to prestage the client machine accounts in RIS, and specify an image for each computer account.

How would I go about implementing this? i.e How do I prestage the client machine accounts?

[cluberti]

Create a machine object for the machine in question in AD, and you will see that in the properties of the object, there is a Remote Installation tab - you can do quite a bit in there to tell the machine account which image it should gather, and from which server (if you have more than 1).