I rarely (and I mean RARELY) come in on Fridays, but I decided to come in this Friday because there were some PCs that needed prepped for our interns by Tuesday.
We have a base package of software that gets installed on our PCs by default, and until now, it’s been somewhat of a pain, especially when I have to prep a PC that I don’t have an image built already for.
I don’t know what led me to do this, and I don’t know why I never thought of it sooner, but I found that if you run an installer from the command line and add a “/?” switch, there’s a real good chance you’ll see an option to run the installer in silent mode — basically this means no user interaction … SWEET! Take that option, throw in some scripting, and you’ve got a VERY hassle-free way to install a good bit of software. There are some rogue installers out there that don’t give you a silent install option, and so those are in a separate folder. Once those are done, the script kicks in, installs the rest of the software, and also copies all the sysprep tools onto the new machine so that we can reseal it and get it ready for imaging.
There’s quite a few imaging tools out there. I decided to use SystemRescueCD for what we’re doing. SysRescCD is basically a live Gentoo Linux image that contains a nice array of tools for disk troubleshooting, partition resizing, and backup. I simply boot the CD, make a samba connection to my imaging share, and run a script that packages the MBR, the partition table, and all of the partitions up, compresses them, and uploads them to the share. A separate script will download the image you select, and apply it to any blank harddrive.Â
If you’ve got a decent knowledge of Linux (my Linux skills are nothing to brag on), download the ISO and give SysRescCD a try. If you want the upload and download scripts to make life easy, give me a shout and I’ll pass them along.
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