I've never really done any blogging. I've made some web pages, but that is about it. I am hoping that I can turn this page into a resource for people that are trying to deploy Windows Vista. I'm not going to make any promises about how that is going to go.
I've been messing with BDD or Microsoft Deployment now for about 6 months. When I got hired on at my current job I was tasked with building the Vista deployment scheme for our general student use computer labs. I was very familiar with how we were doing the XP deployments so I didn't think it was going to be a big deal. Boy was I wrong.
Thus far I've read through some of the white papers that MS shipped with BDD. I was not pleased with the very high level that they were written at. I wanted a click here and do this to accomplish that they documentation. What I was reading was a talk to you network admin and see how much bandwidth you have so that when you deploy you will not crash your network. Handy advice to be sure, but not very useful when our test lab building was 6 to 9 months out.
At any rate, I started getting my feet wet in the Vista deployment waters with BDD. The program was very lacking and fairly buggy. I'm not the type for submitting bug reports so I didn't care to troubleshoot the problems with the program itself. I just wanted to get it fairly stable and drive on with my work. Since then I've come a very long way, I think, and pretty much all on my own. I've done a lot of googling for things. I've tried to decipher other people's blog posts and figure out what I was doing wrong that everyone else seemed to have no problems with.
Some of the things that I would like to discuss here are the problems I've solved (I think), and some of the deadends I went down that I was not smart enough to figure out the solution to.
One of the big things that I had to deal with is OUs. I'll post the problems I was having and my fixes in the future.
The BDD/Deployment tool itself and it's oddities (as far as I see them).
CustomSettings.ini and Bootstrap.ini and what they mean to me.
The structure of the deployment folder.
Some things that I don't know if I will ever get into on this blog is doing system upgrades with the Vista deployment tools. Luckily I just have to wipe the machine and move on. No data is stored locally on the machines that I deal with so I don't care.
Hopefully in the future this will help someone out with their frustrations on dealing with the Vista deployment tools.
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