Hi all,
I wanted to share something which is came in handy for us not too long ago. One of our remote branches had a flood recently which wiped out about 20 workstations. The replacements were ordered and shipped directly to the branch on accident, instead of to a location which had already been set up for imaging. The office has a slower 5Mb circuit, so imaging all 20 workstations would take a long time once IT staff were on site. We were looking at paying for shipping the workstations two more times and waiting for a few more days before we could get all the workstations up and running until I realized that we could set up a portable PXE Rep/Preferred Server on a laptop and just send that with the IT Staff that were going to the branch anyway and do it locally that night. Here's how I set it up.
Step 1. Find a laptop with enough hard drive space to accommodate all the drivers, applications and images used in our provisioning templates (about 60GB for us). We'll call this laptop PortImage.
Step 2. Push the PXE Representative package to PortImage.
Step 3. Add the laptop as a Preferred Server in LDMS Content Replication and replicate all the data.
Step 4. Add the subnet of the remote branch into the IP Address Ranges of PortImage's Preferred Server Properties.
Step 5. Go to the remote branch and image all the workstations over the 1Gb LAN.
Granted I did not get very granular in these steps, but I can add more detail if someone needs it. This is not really a reinvention of the wheel, but we're planning on using this method for future hardware upgrade cycles and when we open new branches. We'll be able to save a lot over money each year on shipping alone (not that I'll see any of it).