Oppergod's Weblog

If you need something to deploy multiple OS from an central point in your network have a look at UDA (http://www.ultimatedeployment.org/uda/index.html). It’s an virtual machine you can use in any vmware product (like Workstation / Server/ ESX Server). And offcourse most important of all, it’s FREE! J

Initially put it in an private network (host-only) enviroment, because it has DHCP on by default and you don’t want that messing with your DHCP in an productive enviroment. Once you put an other machine in the same private network as the UDA, you can browse to 10.0.0.104 to begin setting up the UDA.

To put the UDA in an existing Windows DHCP infrastructure (link):

To Disable DHCP On the UDA:

1. Logon as Admin on the UDA’s web-admin tool
   
2. Click the Services link
   
3. Select the DHCP link
   
4. Click the Configure button
   
5. Disable the option for Start DHCP on boot
   
6. Click the Apply button
   
7. Click the Services link again
   
8. Select the DHCP link again
   
9. Click the Stop button
   

To Enable DHCP On the Windows DHCP:

1. Configure the following Scope Options or Server Options:
   
2. Enable the option 066 Boot Server Host Name, and set the empty string value to be the IP address of your UDA
   
3. Enable the option 067 Bootfile Name, and set the empty string to be, pxelinux.0
   

Then configure UDA with an free IP-address in your production environment and put it in your production environment.

Now you’ve configured Windows to use UDA as the deployment source for PXE clients in your production environment, you can continue to configure UDA.

To put you’re OS-images on an windows server (don’t user an domain controller, because there seems to be a problem with the Fedora Kernel and windows servers acting as a domain controller):

• Create an windows user (for example: image_user).
• Create an windows share and give user Full Control on share and full control on filesystem (if NTFS).
• Mount share in UDA
  • Mount Points > Create New mountpoint
  • Fill in settings
    
    
• Copy images you want to use to the share we’ve just created
• Configure OS (For example Windows XP)
  • OS > Configure
    
• Configure Template
  • Templates > Create new template
  • If you want to change the .sif file UDA uses to automate the WINXP install, edit the template configuration.

• And now you’re ready to boot up your PXE client