WinXP: How to setup remote/network boot??

[jarnold]

I have about 30 machines out there. Each machine has multiple partitions. When the machine boots, the System Commander boot manager gives them a list of 3 choices of which partition the user can boot into.

Ideally, when the user selects one of these options, I’d like the machine (connected to the network) to boot from a master image or boot server, also connected to the network. This would download the operating system (probably but not necessarily windows xp), as well as a standard set of applications that are specific to the selected environment.

The only other solution I see is to have the entire environment for each partition loaded totally on the hard drive of each of the 30 machines. But I don’t like this solution because if I need to apply a Windows patch, and/or provide a new image for one of the applications, then I need to propogate that to all 30 machines. Yea, I could use Norton Ghost Enterprise to do that, but then you need to boot each of the 30 machines using the Ghost boot floppy, and it all starts to fall into the “too hard” category.

Any insights you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Jon

[David_Jones]

Hi Jon,

Just a thought, but wouldn't the first solution (download the OS at each boot) take quite some time (even over a normal corporate network)?

I am thinking that the cumulative time wasted across all those staff, some (or perhaps most) of which are probably directly customer facing / operational people who are actually making the money, will be huge.

I would suggest that you might be better to lose an hour a machine from your tech support staff, when you want to do an upgrade, than 10 mins a day across all the other staff.

10 mins / day multiplied by 5 days, by 30 staff = 25 hours a week.

Even if you spend 50 mins per machine upgrading the image / OS / apps EVERY week, then you are still breaking even.

If you are upgrading just once a month, then an additional boot time of 3 mins still comes out against wasting the users' time.

It might mean the tech guy(s) have to pull an all weekender occasionally, but commercially that might be a far better solution, even if it is not so easy from a technical perspective.

HTH,

David.

[jarnold]

David, thanks and I hear what you're saying, but this first beta install is about 30 machines -- future installs might be closer to 300 or more. Having the user wait 10 minutes (rough estimate) for the OS and applications to load over the network is acceptable for the users, as opposed to the cost of paying techs to go from machine to machine, campus-wide, to manually update a single (or multiple) partitions on each PC.

My "default" is to use Ghost Enterprise, but then each PC needs to be booted with a Ghost Client floppy, which will then allow the Ghost Console to shoot an entire image (OS and apps) to the designated partition on the client PC, over the network. But instead of having 30 machines (or 300 or more), each with 3-4 partitions, and having to ensure that each has the right OS with appropriate patches as well as the latest version of the apps, I thought it would be easier to maintain *ONE* version of each target OS and apps, if I could get them to boot from a network boot server.

Is there a better way to approach this? I'm all ears and very open to suggestions.