Remote OS Installation

Installing an OS is one of the most time consuming tasks, especially if you have to do it on hundreds of machines, and more so if it involves multiple OSs. You would need the CDs of all the OSs and you would have to run from one machine to another for the installation. If not, you have to share a location on the network and copy the files from there. We discussed how to do an unattended Win XP installation in the previous article, but what if you want to install other OSs. There’s a way by which you can deploy any version of Windows and even Linux on any workstation you want over the network. We’ll discuss how this can be done in

this article. 

All nodes on the network must have LAN cards with a PXE BOOT ROM (PreBoot Executable Environment). Then you also need a DHCP server, a TFTP, and a PXE server. The client’s PXE ROM will first send a DHCP request to the network.

The DHCP server will respond to this request and allocate an IP address to the client. The client will then look for a PXE server and send a request to it. The PXE server will respond by sending a boot image file to the client using the TFTP server.

You could use your network server’s DHCP for the job (which in our case was the Win 2000 Server). The TFTP and PXE servers are available separately, and there are commercial packages that bundle these together. We used one such package called Argon Client Management Services. You could also use the Remote Installation Server, which is a part of Windows 2000 Server for the job, or there’s also Novell ZenWorks for Desktops. 

This software is very easy to use, and can be set up on any Windows platform. You can download a 15-days trial from

www.argontechnology.com/cms/. After installation, this software automatically configures itself and starts all its services needed for remote OS installation. To configure it, you simply need to assign the image file of the OS, which you would like to deploy on the workstation. Open Client Boot manager from Start>Programs> Argon Client Management Services. This will open up a Client Boot manager window. Here, on right panel, you will find “default” icon. Right-click on this and select “Reassign” from the drop-down menu. This will prompt you with a dialog box, asking you the location of the OS image. By default it keeps the image file in

C:\tftp.

When installing different OSs on different workstations at the same time, then you also need to define the MAC addresses of all the clients and assign the required OS image file to each in the Client Boot Manger program. The image is a standard .img image file, which can be created using software like

Magic ISO maker (on this month’s DVD). You can even try out the image we created for Win XP in the previous article.

Sanjay Majumder