Imaging

As I was working on our hardware independent imaging, it occurred to me that checking Active Directory for the existence of the computername that I was about to image would be pretty cool. We use WinPE 2.1 on DS 6.9, so my first thought was to pilfer someone else's vbscript (in I/T, plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery) and modify it for my needs. The script worked well enough on my laptop, so off to a deployment task it went. And failed. I beat my head upon this problem for awhile, and called tech support. Apparently, ldap binds do not work with WinPE 2.1, so I couldn't query Active Directory with vbscript (Thanks anyway, Nate!). "How about dsquery?" I asked myself. It doesn't work from WinPE 2.1 either. What was I to do?

If you want to consolidate your storage into centralized arrays but don't want to spend all your budget on an expensive SAN system, iSCSI is the answer. iSCSI brings SAN functionality to Ethernet allowing you to simplify your data storage needs. Use this article to discover how to use the Linux preboot environment to deploy images to your iSCSI targets and configure your NIC firmware to boot iSCSI allowing your servers to run completely disk-less.

Altiris PC Transplant Solution version 6.8 provides customers with the ability to transfer data, applications, and applications settings from one computer to another using a variety of methods. One of the lesser used features is the ability to use a crossover cable to transfer profiles. This document demonstrates one example of how this can be accomplished.

Picture this. You get a new computer. It has all of your files and folders from your previous computer, including the cool new wallpaper from the vacation photo you recently were on. A nice, wide screen picture. All of the sudden, you press CTRL-ALT-DELETE to lock your computer to go to lunch, and that nice wallpaper goes into ..... Tiled mode..... Now no one can see that awesome beach you got sunburned on, because there are 24 duplicates of it nicely tiled on your screen. How did that happen?

Do you hate, when launching the Altiris console for the first time, that you have to install those CAB files?

Well, Altiris has provided a neat little utility to install those CAB files for you.

With the recent release of Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3, Altiris administrators might be taking this opportunity to build a new base image for their environment. There are dozens of ways to build this base image and with more than a dozen documents circulating in the Altiris community related to creating Hardware Independent Images it can be frustrating to find all the information necessary in one document. The purpose of this document is to provide a step-by-step process that walks through every step necessary to build a Hardware Independent Image.

So the debate went through our office about what is the best pre-image environment... WinPE, BartPE, Linux or DOS. Consequently, we tried to do a complete analysis of many of the factors and determine what is really the fastest route to take. In the end, it all comes down to how quick we can get our imaging done and move on to other projects.