Faculty Installations

Overview | Making the Images | PCRdist | Configuration

Overview

Distributing a lot of machines at once can be very time intensive, and tedious process. Luckily there are many tools available to us techs in order to help us deal with this problem. One of these programs is PCRdist, which allows you to create scripts that can distribute the images and registry fragments from one setup to the next. I have used PCRdist in many different ways, and have found that making scripts that are "unobtrusive" is a very nice way of setting up a lot of computers. The word "unobtrusive" in this context means that the script does not try to overwrite sensitive OS level stuff. It just adds the files and registry fragments that you would like to have added. This is a Tech's dream, you can setup a lot of applications on one computer, and distributed that same setup to any other computer. It certainly saves time.

Making the Images

The process behind Making the images is simple, yet needs to be followed very precisely in order for it to work properly.

1. Regdump.exe
2. Windiff.exe

How to make an image:

1. Install Windows 95/98
2. Install needed drivers (for network cards, etc.)
3. DON'T make any changes before you upload the first image that you may want to have INCLUDED in the image for the rest of the machines. The first image is just the "before" image.
4. Run Regdump to get a "master" copy of the registry. (You could alternatively export the registry using regedit.exe)
   • Usage: (at a dos prompt)
   • regdump.exe -o master.reg
5. Use an Upload Script or just copy the full file structure to some server location. (Make sure not to copy 'win386.swp', the copy will bomb out on you if you try to copy that file.
6. Install the application/s that you want to have installed on all the machines. Make sure to configure them the way you would like them to be configured on all the machines.
7. Reboot the computer to make sure the registry gets updated and everything works right.
8. Run regdump.exe again to get a '.reg' file that has all the different registry keys.
   • Usage:
   • regdump.exe master.reg -o difference.reg
9. Now you are ready to run Windiff.exe! (This is available in the MS Visual C++ tools, or the windows 98 Resource Kit tools)
10. Run windiff.exe and go to File --> Compare directories. You want to compare the local drive c:\ with the server directory that you uploaded the image to. (In our case I:\pcrdist\pcrdist\images\win981\).
11. You want to see the "different files" and either the left or right only files (depending on which one is drive C:\ ) those are going to be the files you want to keep.
12. After what seems to be too much time, it will let you "copy" files that are different. You want to copy all the files that were different AND in drive C:\. Copy them to a local directory, when it is done, you will have the whole thing. You will even have the difference.reg file in the root directory of where you copied the differing files to. *important* --> make sure you delete the system.dat and user.dat files, including them in the regular distribution can be a DISASTER. Also, make sure the '.reg' file only has information specific the the application that was installed, and nothing more!
13. Move the directory to the server, move the '.reg' file to where you keep registry files (if you keep them separate) and make your script for it!
14. Get a cold beverage of choice, drink, repeat. (Added this step just so that this wouldn't stop at 13)

PCRdist

PCRdist? | Upload Script | Download Scripts

PCRDist is a product of Pyzzo Software. It is an absolutely wonderful invention!

The following scripts are my upload and "unobtrusive" download scripts for PCRdist:

The Upload script uploads the first image to the server. This is only for the "compare" image that is needed in order to find out the different files.

An important note: Make sure you DO NOT try to upload 'win386.swp', this file is the swap file, and does not want to be moved, so ignore it! Important part of the script:

; Make sure the swap file is ignored, as well as the '.dat' registry files (you don't want them)

• > Windows
• | win386.swp : i
• | system.da? : i r
• | user.da? : i
• <

  98Upload.dst --> The Upload Script

Download Script

The downloading of the files is extremely important. If this is done wrong, you can end up with a very unusable system (no pressure here!). Things to keep in mind to watch out for:

1. Make sure you have all the "user.dat" and "system.dat" files OUT of the distribution directories. If you leave any stale '.dat' files around, you can easily mess up the registry on the existing machine, and these are supposed to be "unobtrusive" scripts... so we don't want that.
2. Look through individual registry slices (.reg files) that you took for each separate image. Make sure you take out registry information that DOES NOT BELONG. It is imperative that the individual '.reg' files only contain information about the application/s that it pertains to. If it has extra stuff, it can easily mess things up.
3. DO NOT EVER set a DELETE flag! This would be insane! Nowhere in ANY script should there be a delete flag set. If there is, get rid of it! You only want to add files, and/or replace older files with newer files. You never want to delete anything. (plus, if you set the delete flag, you would end up deleting everything but what you have in your distribution directories, and that would be very very bad)

inc_full.dst --> The Download Script

The most important part of this "full" script are the '#include' files. I have included other separate scripts that have the individual registries and directories of the programs that I would like to install. This makes it fairly custamizable, you can add a new program fairly easily.

inc_comm.dst --> One Included Script (includes 98comm.dst)

Notice that you have to specify the subkeys of the registry in order for it to update it. (new in PCR-dist 2.0).

Two things that I have found help me a lot with the unobtrusive scripts are the following flag settings (one for the registry block, the other for the file block):

1. > registry \modreg\comm.reg : missing size crc
2. > C:\ \Modules\comm : missing

Configuration

The following configuration is for the SUNY Potsdam campus Faculty:

After the computer has a network connection, you can then go to (on our network) \\zeus\images and click on the "Full Install" link that I had pre-made to point to "I:\PCRDist\pcrdist\distfiles\Mod_include\inc_full.dst".

This Link will call the script that runs the full installation of all the applications that we want.  You may optionally map \\zeus\images to "I:\"; this may speed things up a bit.

After the Script has run, there are a few things that need to be taken care of:

1. Get rid of the stupid "toolbar" in on the Start Bar. We don't want that there.
2. Uninstall "McAffee Virus Scan". We are using F-Secure as our Virus Scanner, and there is no need to have McAffee taking up space.
3. Remove all Internet Explorer Icons and Outlook express icons. (and anything else that annoys you). There is no use in confusing the customer with random icons of programs that we don't even support.
4. Make sure that you "close and stop" the "Scheduled Tasks" program that runs in the system tray. This only seems to add problems for people, (more crashes, etc.)
5. Make sure the networking is all set. (Computer name, workgroup, logging into the right Domain, etc.)
6. Copy over Eudora mailboxes '.toc' and '.mbx' files from their current computer to the new computer, also any other Eudora 'settings' files that are needed.
7. Copy over Netscape profile, bookmarks, etc. from current computer to new computer.
8. Make sure that it is logging into the right domain, and that the user knows their login name / password for that domain.

    

   That is it! It looks rather simple, and straightforeward, but it sure took a lot of thinking to get to this point! If there is anything that you think I have left out please email me at thern18@potsdam.edu