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Windows XP with Windows Deployment Services

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I received a new computer yesterday for the museum. So I decided RIS was the way to go for imaging the computer.  I have upgraded my RIS server to WDS and set it up in mixed mode. This was done some time back. I haven’t put Windows Vista as an image on it as we don’t really plan on upgrading to Vista corporately any time soon. We will probably upgrade to Vista when we roll out new computers in the next year or so. (Doesn’t mean my laptop won’t be upgraded sooner though). I went to put the standard Windows XP base image you make from the CD onto the new computer and it didn’t make it past the network boot, I got an error message about TFTP. Worked fine when RIS was there alone.

Did a search and found a good message thread going on in Microsoft Technet in their forums. The solution is to make sure you have a boot image on the WDS server. Meaning, on your WDS server, make sure you install a boot image from the Windows Vista DVD sources folder (boot.wim). Once that was added, I was able to access my legacy RIS images again. 

Figured I would pass this along in case anyone else sees  the same problem.

More Time Zone Change Information

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Rick has posted some great information from Pierre Roman about the daylight savings change happening in 2007. For those who don’t know, Pierre is a Technical Account Manager with Microsoft. I had the pleasure of working with Pierre back in my days when I worked for the City of Kingston and he was a consultant with Quanara.

This is the best plain language document I have seen on the subject yet. It covers most of the main Microsoft applications.

The article is located here. Ou si vous préférez, voici l’article en français.

I was wondering about SQL Server and found this article on the subject.

Looks like I am good to go now.

Windows Vista Administrator’s Pocket Consultant – It Arrived.

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For those of you don’t know, my Sys Admin job is with County of Lennox and Addington in their Information Service’s Department. This department covers Communications, Libraries and Museums, but since I am the only computer person on-staff for the Court House, I get to support some of the other departments as well on as needed basis.

One of the perks working for the libraries is the ability order in books for the libraries. Needless to say, the amount of IT books the library has been ordering has shot up substantially. I have ordered a few in, but I finally got the Administrator’s Pocket Consultant for Windows Vista. I have been waiting a couple months for this one to come in.  I have just skimmed it, and it looks like it covers off the a good chunk of material and has some advanced troubleshooting tips in there as well. I think it costs about $25.00 through an online book retailer or it’s $36.99 at Chapters. Being that low in price, it probably isn’t a bad investment for the bookshelf at the office. Next book on the list is MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-620): Configuring Windows Vista™ Client. I don’t think it is released until May 2007 though.