There is still one last thing about RIS – how do we control who gets an image? Well, there are two main options. When you run
Riprep.exe, you get to choose whether anyone can obtain an image or whether the RIS server should not respond to ‘unknown’ clients. An unknown client is any system whose computer account has not been pre-staged. A client is pre-staged by setting up its computer account in Active directory, and then associating a unique identifier from the client PC, called a GUID (globally unique identifier) with that computer account. Then, the RIS server will only allow computers that have been pre-staged in Active Directory to be allocated an image. How do I find the GUID of my computer? Look in the BIOS. If its not there, you can also use the MAC address of the client NIC padded with leading zeros.
The other option is to restrict the image’s associated answer file with
NTFS permissions, as mentioned earlier. Finally, if you do not pre-stage, then remember that computer accounts still somehow need to be created when people obtain a new desktop via RIS. The solution here is to use the Delegation of control wizard to give the appropriate group of users the ability to ‘Join a Computer to the Domain’.
Need more detail? Find it
here.
Deploying Service Packs
Anyone who has spent time in the field supporting Windows NT 4.0 knows the horror of dealing with service pack upgrades. Not only did you need to deploy the service pack, but then go back and reapply it if you added a new service from the original source files! Windows 2000 takes care of this using an idea called slipstreaming. Using slipstreaming, you can deploy Windows 2000 using service pack-updated source files. To update the source files you would use the
update.exe /s command, specifying the location of your Windows 2000 source directory. Since the actual source files are updated, you no longer need to worry about adding services after a service pack upgrade. If you have already installed Windows 2000, you can simply run
update.exe manually, and then update the source files via slipstreaming for future use.
That pretty much covers the basics of installing Windows 2000 Professional. Next week’s article will focus on topic
2: Implementing and Conducting Administration of Resources. Since this is my first article, I am very interested in any feedback you might be interested in providing, or answering any questions you might
have about the series. Also be sure to check out my website at http://www.win2000trainer.com/
– it contains free online Windows 2000 exam preparation tests, as well as links to free hardcopy books and other useful resources. I look forward to my next article, and hope that you find this series to be a useful resource. Until next week, happy trails!
Dan