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Question : How to Add New PCs to Existing Domain Automatically
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Hello Experts! I have a very unique problem here. I am receiving a shipment of leased (rental) workstations that already have the OS installed (XP SP2). These PCs will need to be added to my domain which is not a problem for me. However, with a large shipment like this one, I would like to find a way to automate this rollout as much as possible.
When these PCs are powered on and connected to our LAN, they will most likely obtain their own IP via APIPA since they won't be able to "see" my DHCP server. So, here are the steps I would like to achieve:
1. Plug in and power PCs on.
2. Connect Ethernet cable.
3. ***AUTOMATE TCP/IP SETUP AND JOIN TO DOMAIN***
4. Connect to PCs remotely and install apps, etc.
Step 3 is where I need your help. Also, the PCs will most likely be in their own workgroup and the initial logon screen will ask for logon to instead of a different domain (the vendor wipes them and reinstalls clean before reissuing them for rental/lease again). I am working in a W2K Server domain and do not have anything advanced like SMS.
I think I just need someone who has done this before to point me down the right path for an automated install of this type. I do not want to wipe these clean again and deploy RIS images or anything like that since they were installed by the vendor with their XP media. Plus, the vendor at least went ahead and installed MS Office on them. If I can just join them to my domain in an easy way, I can finish the setup of a couple of other apps and then put people in front of them.
Thanks in advance for all of your help!
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Answer : How to Add New PCs to Existing Domain Automatically
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You will need a couple things to make this happen :
1). a PXE Server (pre-execution environment), this allows a PC to boot via its NIC and talk to a PXE Server and get boot information from it.
2). An imaging server which supports SID allocation, this basically means you setup an image which is to your liking and deploy it to all the workstations and have it change the SID for each deployed Image
3). A DHCP Server to throw IP's at the clients to get them connected to the network, can be the same as your PXE Server.
4). A script which joins PC's to the domain, this is not to difficult as XP supports doing this from the command line via netdom :
netdom /domain:domainname /user:username /password:password member /joindomain
You can use environment variables to change the computername variable so its not the same every time.
You should check out Altiris for this, or Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition
http://www.altirispro.com/Products/Altiris/deployment-solution.html
http://sea.symantec.com/content/product.cfm?productid=9
Good Luck and let me know if you need more Info.
- SaP -
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