want to have to search after drivers—and so RBDG supports all of my machines. But that might not be the case for all of your systems.
FIGURE 5.26
Remote Boot Disk Generator dialog box
Actually, let me take that back. Not all of my systems will work with an RBDG floppy—my older laptops won’t. As I mentioned earlier, only systems with mini-PCI type integrated network cards have a prayer of being supported. The Server 2003 flavor of RBDG has, however, a mini-PCI driver for 3Com NICs, which is good if your laptop has that kind of NIC. My newer laptops, however, have either the Intel mini-PCI or the Realtek mini-PCI. Does that leave me out? No, because fortunately my laptops not only have mini-PCI cards in them, they also have PXE clients in their ROMs, so, again, all’s not lost if your system doesn’t have one of the Magic 32 NICs in it.
There’s some more bad news about RBDG. What about the fact that new network cards appear all of the time? It’s not unreasonable at all to suggest that a year after Server 2003’s release you might find yourself trying to install an OS on a system with a brand-spanking-new network card that RBDG simply doesn’t know how to handle. How do you introduce RBDG to a new set of drivers?
Unfortunately, you can’t. Microsoft promised back in the Windows 2000 days that they would “periodically” update RBDG.exe, but the fact is that they never did. So let me say again that you may
never need a PXE boot disk if you’re buying new computers. Any computer with a PXE BIOS and an integrated NIC can use RIS without any floppies at all—these computers have been designed to support RIS, so to speak, and so won’t need a floppy. As time goes on, it’s reasonable to hope that more and more computers will be “net-bootable.”
In any case, if you generate a PXE boot disk, stick it into the target machine and boot the machine. You’ll see a screen with something like the following text:
Microsoft Windows Remote Installation Boot Floppy
Copyright 2001 Lanworks Technologies Co. a subsidiary of 3Com Corporation All rights reserved.
3Com 3C90XB / 3C90XC EtherLink PC Node: 00105AE2859F
DHCP...
TFTP...
INSTALLING SERVER 2003 WITH REMOTE INSTALLATION SERVICES 161
Press F12, and a text screen appears that says:
Welcome to the Client Installation wizard. This wizard helps
you quickly and easily set up a new operating system
on your computer. You can also use this wizard to keep
your computer up-to-date and to troubleshoot computer
hardware problems.
In the wizard, you are asked to use a valid user name, password,
and domain name to log in to the network. If you do not
have this information, contact your network administrator
before continuing. Press Enter to continue
You are looking here at some client software downloaded from the RIS server called the Client Install Wizard. Look back to the first screen and notice the TFTP with all the periods after it—that was the Trivial File Transfer Protocol transferring a very simple text-based operating system to your computer.
Tip But what if you don’t get a response from PXE? If your system just searches and searches for DHCP but gets
no response, then check your network switches. I once worked at a site where we couldn’t get a PXE boot to work to save our lives. Then someone noticed that the Ethernet switches had a feature called “minimal spanning tree” enabled. Apparently it filtered or slowed down the DHCPDISCOVER broadcasts that the workstation did to find a DHCP server, and so the workstation never got an IP address from DHCP. So check your network infrastructure before you assume that a RIS client has bad hardware. And if it still doesn’t work, then think about putting a network packet analyzer on the network segment so that you can watch the DHCP/TFTP process. Also check the NIC. I had one RIS server that worked perfectly for 90 percent of my workstations, but 10 percent just plain couldn’t see it. The problem? It had a 10-megabit NIC and they had a 100-megabit NIC. Why that should trouble some 100Mb NICs and not others is a mystery to me, but you might want to be careful about matching 100Mb client NICs with 100Mb NICs on RIS servers. As I’ve said earlier, avoid multi-NIC systems for RIS servers.
What’s kind of interesting about this initial RIS setup screen is that the introductory screen, and all of the other text screens that you’ll see from the Client Install Wizard, are built on a slightly modified version of HTML. You can see the “source code” for that first screen by looking on the RIS server in \RemoteInstall\OSChooser\English directory and examining the file named welcome.osc. It looks like the following:
<OSCML>
<META KEY=ENTER HREF="LOGIN"> <META KEY=F3 ACTION="REBOOT"> <META KEY=ESC HREF="LOGIN"> <META KEY=F1 HREF="LOGIN">
<TITLE> Client Installation Wizard Welcome</TITLE>
<FOOTER> [ENTER] continue </FOOTER> <BODY left=5 right=75>
<BR> <BR> <BR>