Better Task Deployment
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Try this sysprep guide
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The guide worked perfectly. I just made some minor changes and got it configured the way I wanted to, so it’ll only prompt me for a PC name. However, the last hurdle, and apparently a well known issue, auto joining to the domain. From the way the answer file works, it’ll join the PC to the domain prior to being named, giving it a random name in AD. I’ve found the following command that can be used but have a question on one piece of it.
[B][I]NETDOM /Domain:YOURDOMAIN /user:DOMAINADMIN /password:DOMAINPASSWORD MEMBER [COLOR=#0000ff]COMPUTERNAME[/COLOR] /JOINDOMAIN[/I][/B]
I know that you have to have the AD tools installed to used this, as netdom is not part of windows 7 by default. However, to truly automate the process can the computer name in blue be set to something like %pcname% to automatically pull in the name of the computer? With us having close to 10,000 machines, we would like to have as much of the imaging process automated as possible. I’ve seen a powershell script and also a vbs script that claim to do the same thing, so i’m curious to see if the above post would work, or if there is an easier way yet to accomplish this task.[B][I] [/I][I][/I][/B]
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Yeah i found it when I checked my Dropbox folder, its the guide that got me started with sysprepping.
Why do you not use the client, I only use it for joining domain? -
I’m on me phone at the moment, but first thought is. %localhost% maybe
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It wasn’t up to me unfortunately. I was told that we can’t use the client based on the fact that it would cause to much “traffic” on the network with it checking in. Our way of imaging computers was very backwards. A group of us built FOG in an office to get bugs worked out until we were ready to demo it. The boss liked what he saw, the fact that it was much simpler to setup machines, and the fact that you wouldn’t have to remember cd’s or flash drives everywhere you went, we could PXE boot from any machine. So we were asked to put our server in the DC. When we brought up installing the client on the machines, we had a test pilot group of computers which we were very successful with. However, we were told that we were unsure of the traffic it would generate being on every machine. So we are forced to look at doing the images without the clients installed. BTW, I’m not in charge of our images, I was just sick of all the little steps we had to take to get an image installed on a computer, hence why we put FOG together
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oh fair enough, you could mention that you can install the client to enable domain joining, but disable all other services (to stop any other network traffic). PC can also use name given in FOG Webui, then join domain with that name, thats what I have set up.
It use to be backwards at my old place of work, that’s what led me to FOG
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Falko, would you happen to have that guide still from your DB? I had my computer crash and lost all my guides/notes I had made and found. Just trying to rebuild the collection. Being a fully encrypted RAID 0+1 setup, there wasn’t much chance of retrieving the data
Thankfully, the VM’s are on a separate drive so I still have those. -
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Awesome, thanks much.
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no probs