Ohjeah!

As a follow-up to my previous post regarding pxe with wds, I recently came across  a new issue which I’ve not seen before:

“There was a problem initializing WDS mode.”

This error started after a recent migration of the network to vlans, mstp, and vrrp at the core.  The pxe/wds/dhcp servers have changed addresses however remain in the same VLAN.  All configurations have been updated accordingly, dhcpd options, correct ip-helper addresses, etc..

While I haven’t had much time to look at it, a quick work-around seems to place the client within the same vlan as the wds server.  I’ll try to look at this some more when I have time.

As a continuation of my previous WDS post located here, these are the steps I follow for creating my WDS images.

• Install OS, drivers, service packs, software, updates, and everything else to master system.
• Copy Windows installation media to local drive: xcopy /H /E D:\* C:\windows\options\cabs\
• Copy deploy.cab from recent installation media, extract to sysprep folder located on the administrator’s desktop.
• From a Windows command prompt, browse to sysprep folder and run:  sysprep.exe -mini -reseal (with optional flags) 
• Wait for system to shutdown..  start system back up, ensure PXE or network boot is enabled.
• Boot from PXE/WDS, select Windows PE from options menu. 
• At Windows PE command prompt, run: wdscapture
• Follow Windows Image Capture wizard.

Today I decided to setup automated installations for Linux distros (RHEL, Fedora, CentOS), similar to how we deploy our Windows installations via PXE.  Since we already had WDS running for installing Windows, it was just a matter of reconfiguring WDS, setting up the necessary structure and kickstart files for our automated Linux installations.  While I do not cover the initial WDS installation process, I will attempt to go over the steps performed after the basic WDS install (native or mixed).  Read the rest of this entry »