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. <BR>
<BR>
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. </BODY>
</OSCML>
If you’ve got any familiarity with HTML, then understanding this is simple—things surrounded by angle brackets <> are tags, commands to the computer. They’re often in pairs like right and left parentheses—<oscml> starts the “program,” </oscml> ends it. That forward slash ( / ) indicates that
it’s the end of a command—for example, <TITLE>ClientInstallationWizard</TITLE> indicates
that there’s a command, <TITLE> (which, as you can guess, puts a title in the screen), then there’s the
text that’s supposed to go into the title, and then </TITLE>, which says, “That’s the end of the title text.”
Again, they’re like left and right parentheses. The <METAKEY> commands tell the wizard what to
do when you press particular keys. <METAKEY=ENTERHREF="LOGIN"> means, “When the user presses
the Enter key, run the program login.osc.” <METAKEY=F3ACTION="REBOOT"> means that if the user
presses the F3 key, then just reboot the system.
My intent here isn’t to document the entire programming language—Microsoft hasn’t completely documented it yet, to my knowledge—but to point out that you could easily change the generic welcome text to something customized to your particular company.
Anyway, once you press Enter, you’re prompted for a username, password, and domain. The account that you log in with must have the ability to create new computer accounts. You’ll next be advised that the process will delete any data on the existing hard disk:
The following settings will be applied to this computer installation. Verify these settings before continuing.
Computer account: ADMINMARK1
Global Unique ID: 0000000000000000000000105AE2859F Server supporting this computer: CADOTNET
To begin Setup, press Enter. If you are using the Remote
Installation Services boot floppy, remove the floppy
diskette from the drive and press Enter to continue.
Here, the RIS client software has chosen a name for the computer, ADMINMARK1, that it constructed by taking my login name—ADMINMARK was the account I used at the time—and adding a number to it. The Global Unique ID, or GUID (pronounced “gwid”), is just an ID number that RIS assigned to that computer. PXE-capable machines all have a GUID built right into them, but machines using RIS boot floppies get a GUID constructed for them consisting of 20 hex zeros followed by their NIC’s MAC address. Finally, the Client Install Wizard tells you the name of the RIS server that it’s getting its image from. Once you press Enter to confirm, pop the floppy out of
INSTALLING SERVER 2003 WITH REMOTE INSTALLATION SERVICES 163
the A: drive and walk away for a half hour or so. When you return, whatever OS you chose will be installed completely hands-off on the machine.
RIS sets the system up like so:
◆ The new machine joins the RIS server’s domain.
◆ RIS repartitions the machine’s hard disk into just one large partition and formats that partition as NTFS, no matter how the drive was previously partitioned.
◆ The new system has all of the settings you’d find in a typical install. Want to change any of that? Then you’ll need to create some system images.
Creating a System Image with RIPrep
Even doing a no-frills installation on a new system with RIS is pretty nice. But it would be nicer to provide not only a vanilla operating system but perhaps a few settings and certainly an application or two—now, that would make the Ghost guys sweat! (But not sweat all that much, as you’ll see. Ghost is still better than RIS. But Ghost costs money, and RIS comes free with Server from the 2000 edition onward.) You can do such a thing, creating what’s called a RIPrep image format image. Here’s how you do it:
1. Set up a prototypical Win2K, XP, or Server 2003 system as you’d like it. Make sure that all of the code and data are on drive C:—no other drives will be copied by RIS.
2. Run the Remote Installation Preparation Wizard (RIPrep), which strips the SIDs off the prototypical machine.
3. Once the image is on the RIS server, it’s available to new systems for installation.
For my example, I’ve installed Office 2000 onto an XP Professional workstation. To create the RIPrep image, I log in to that prototypical machine with a domain administrator account. I then open up My Network Places and navigate over to my RIS server, the machine named CADOTNET. RIS creates a share called REMINST on every RIS server. I open REMINST, then I open up the folder inside labeled Admin, and then I open the folder inside that labeled I386. Inside is a file named
riprep.exe. I double-click it and see the opening screen, as shown in Figure 5.27. Click Next to see
the screen shown in Figure 5.28. FIGURE 5.27
Opening screen of RIPrep