Project #1. Computer imaging system

Currently, the only computer manager on the payroll is the IT administrator (my mentor). She is responsible for managing all computers, all but 1 server, and other technological systems. In addition to this she also teaches classes. On a lot of days, she doesn't even have the time to fix computers in classrooms. Needless to say, she doesn't have time to reinstall one windows computer....none the less 5 or 6. Currently there are anywhere between 5 or 6 desktop computers in classrooms that are currently inoperable, and many many more with viruses. Currently antivirus software is installed on most computers, but since there is no time for our IT person to dedicate a specific amount of time to each computer...

We have about 86 laptops and desktops total, 26 Dell Dimension E521, 50 ish (I dont have the list with me at the moment) Opteron 740s, 8-10 HP 5420s and 5410s and a few HP 620s (all of the laptops run the same OS and for the most part, the same hardware.

So, there are about 3 million industry solutions to manage problems like this......but there is this one thing...

Budget= $0

So, deep freeze, norton ghost, and all of the other industry standard solutions immediately get thrown out the window and we are back to square one.

There is good news, we have an IBM Eserver laying around. It has 2x 72.8gb 15k SCSI 320 drives, 3.6ghz hyperthreading Xeon processor, and around 8gb of ram. As far as a server can get, it isn't that shabby, so at least we have something REAL to work with.

So, what about that solution you were talking about?

Well, we have several problems:

• Computers haven't be re-imaged in quite a while
• Computers are currently loaded with factory bloatware
• Antivirus software has been disabled by students/is out of date
• Computers are very slow result of both viruses and bloatware
• NO volume licensing for windows (Although we will try and remedy this at a later step)

But, we also have:

• Our internal network is rather fast (for the most part, our internet is another story)
• We only have 5 different variations of computers and operating systems

So, the solution.......

In this case, we chose to go with a PXE/TFTP server....specifically FOG (Free Opensource Ghost). If you are not familiar with PXE, it stands for Pre eXecution Environment. PXE allows you to boot a kernal via a TFTP (Trivial File Transfer Protocol) server, which then allows you do other things, such as in our case, deploy a pre-cloned image to our server via a NFS server. FOG can also do much more than that. Once FOG is loaded up and functioning, It can perform virus scans on the clients local hard drives, quick and low-level formats, even hardware inventory.....all without discs or flash drives or anything of that sort.

There is some client side setup however, all of the clients on the network need to have their BIOS configured so they boot from PXE first on every boot. On our Dell 740 and E521s, this is as simple as enabling PXE in the devices menu, and then moving the integrated NIC to the top of the boot device priority list. When you turn on the computer at this point, it will boot from the PXE server first....check if it has an active task (which is determined by MAC address) and then, if there is no task, it will boot to windows.

Here is how it works:

For a great guide on installing FOG, see their wiki....It is stuffed full of knowledge and was a very large help while deploying this project.

After your FOG setup is done, you need to create your images. This is a much more complex task, and I wont cover it in this article. But as always, Google is your friend, and there are many more sysprep tutorials out there than the average topic.