You can bring down a sysprep'd image and write a sysprep.inf file containing the name, network settings, etc. for Windows to read during its minisetup.

See our stuff at http://pie.ucs.ed.ac.uk/pie-1.2/ and in particular http://pie.ucs.ed.ac.uk/pie-1.2/bin/image-build-xp for how we do this, optionally using udpcast (or http or CDROM) to fetch the actual image.

Cheers,

Kenny.

On Thu, 2006-09-28 at 09:54 +1000, John Newbigin wrote:

You need a SID changer, which can normally also set the host name.

There is no SID changer for linux.... yet. It so happens that I am working on one at the moment. I hope it will be ready 'real soon now'.

I'll post to this list once I have a test version ready.

John.

Yannick Gingras wrote:

...

Hi I'm wondering if there is a way to set the machine name automatically after the broadcast. I heard that the last version of Ghost do something like that. For the GNU/Linux boxen I can autoset the hostname from a small script in init.d. I don't know much about Windows networking. Is the hostname in some file that we can write to by just mounting the partition? Do we have to mess with the registry?

All the boxes connect to a Samba PDC. Can I copy the machine accounts and let them share the SID?