Cannot install RIS

w^rl0rd

I'm trying to install RIS on Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition
but do not have "Remote Installation Services" listed as a component
in the Windows Components Wizard.

Has anyone run into this problem?

doomie

Is this also running server service pack 2 ?

If so, then it's been changed to 'Windows Deployment Services' (WDS), which in my opinion, is much much better than RIS.

Hope this helps,

Martin

sthomas

You will have to setup Windows Deployment Services in Legacy mode or mixed mode if you what to use RIS on a Windows Server 2003 SP2 server. WDS is good for Vista IMHO, but for XP imaging it is a bit lacking. Of course that makes since it is designed for Vista, that is why you will want to set it up in Legacy mode for XP only imaging and mixed for Vista and XP. Here is a Link with some info on how to configure WDS.

http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsVista/en/library/9e197135-6711-4c20-bfad-fc80fc2151301033.mspx?mfr=true

Man I wish that link was available when I configured this when it first came out.

doomie

Actually, I have great success using WDS for XP rollouts using native mode.

Once you've build the XP Image, to include all the drivers, default settings and such like, run sysprep, all you do is pxeboot and use the capture image. Of course, any later changes have to be manually applied to the image; i.e. reimaging a machine.

We can roll out an XP machine every 5-10 minutes using this; just a default XP Pro/Office build. This includes booting, imaging, expanding and having it ready for use.

The only real issue we've run across was no winpe network support for the newer Intel boards, in particular the D35JO. By default, it fails to load any nic drivers, but using the image tools from the Windows AIK, we could 'expand' the winpe, capture and deployment images, import the latest Intel drivers, close the image, re add it back into WDS, and we had a working environment for the JO boards.
Time to patch - 5 minutes.

Of course, that is a very brief overview. It must've taken a couple of weeks of playing to get the WDS environment working correctly, including registry changes to disable receive side scaling on the network side. With this turned on, the image when deploying, would appear to stall, and take 30-60 mins to deploy. As above, it's now down to 5 mins.

Martin

j938

doomie wrote:

Actually, I have great success using WDS for XP rollouts using native mode.

Once you've build the XP Image, to include all the drivers, default settings and such like, run sysprep, all you do is pxeboot and use the capture image. Of course, any later changes have to be manually applied to the image; i.e. reimaging a machine.

We can roll out an XP machine every 5-10 minutes using this; just a default XP Pro/Office build. This includes booting, imaging, expanding and having it ready for use.

The only real issue we've run across was no winpe network support for the newer Intel boards, in particular the D35JO. By default, it fails to load any nic drivers, but using the image tools from the Windows AIK, we could 'expand' the winpe, capture and deployment images, import the latest Intel drivers, close the image, re add it back into WDS, and we had a working environment for the JO boards.
Time to patch - 5 minutes.

Of course, that is a very brief overview. It must've taken a couple of weeks of playing to get the WDS environment working correctly, including registry changes to disable receive side scaling on the network side. With this turned on, the image when deploying, would appear to stall, and take 30-60 mins to deploy. As above, it's now down to 5 mins.

Martin

Nice - doomie

sthomas

doomie wrote:

Actually, I have great success using WDS for XP rollouts using native mode.

Once you've build the XP Image, to include all the drivers, default settings and such like, run sysprep, all you do is pxeboot and use the capture image. Of course, any later changes have to be manually applied to the image; i.e. reimaging a machine.

We can roll out an XP machine every 5-10 minutes using this; just a default XP Pro/Office build. This includes booting, imaging, expanding and having it ready for use.

The only real issue we've run across was no winpe network support for the newer Intel boards, in particular the D35JO. By default, it fails to load any nic drivers, but using the image tools from the Windows AIK, we could 'expand' the winpe, capture and deployment images, import the latest Intel drivers, close the image, re add it back into WDS, and we had a working environment for the JO boards.
Time to patch - 5 minutes.

Of course, that is a very brief overview. It must've taken a couple of weeks of playing to get the WDS environment working correctly, including registry changes to disable receive side scaling on the network side. With this turned on, the image when deploying, would appear to stall, and take 30-60 mins to deploy. As above, it's now down to 5 mins.

Martin

Well, I have used WDS with sysprep to deploy XP as well and it did not work the way I wanted. Maybe I did not do something correctly or missed something but I had a couple of problems. 1st when I wanted to join the computers automatically to the domain I had to put the password for the account used to join the computers to the domain in clear text in the sysprep answer file which I would not do so I ended up joining them manually. 2nd I could not find a way to get WDS in native mode to automatically partition/format the hard drive before it installed the image, I had to do this manually. So for now for XP imaging I use RIS and Norton Ghost.