Quick and dirty "spare" deployment point

In our environment we have some "problem" labs that we have to deploy Vista into. For one reason or another the network will not really handle deploying several machines at a time. Trying to remedy this solution I got us a nas to work off of. This presents some interesting challenges.

The deployment tool isn't really setup to handle a dual server type setup very well (if at all). I might be missing something that would make this really easy, but I don't think so. Other blogs I have read talk about dns round-robbin and load balancing and the like, but none of those scenarios really address the problems that I face -- slow connections to the server room, either because of a wan-link or a flakey network. At any rate I got us a small nas so that I would have a local resource we could build from in any lab.

What I did was create shares on the nas that are named the same as the ones that are on our primary server. I use two different shares for the deployment and the applications. I then copied all the files over from each share to the corresponding one I made on the nas. After doing this I had to modify a few things to point to the nas.

One of the first things that I had to modify was the bootstrap.ini file to point to my nas -- but that was easier said than done. There might be an easier way to do it than what I put here, but this is what I did. I took the LTI iso and mounted it so I could read/write to it. I then had to open the boot.wim in the Sources folder that is in the iso (for the time being I'm going to leave it to your google-foo to figure that out -- if anyone asks I'll write that up later). I edited the bootstrap.ini in there and saved all of it back out and burned a boot cd.

From there I had to modify serveral files on the nas to point to the nas:

\Control\Applications.xml
and
\Control\*\TS.xml

* is the task sequence number of any task sequence you might use from the nas

I did all of this outside of the deployment tool because I did not want to make two deployment points and I didn't want to duplicate task sequences and have to edit both of them for each change I make (well I have to edit it anyway, but I would rather use a txt editor to do a search and replace rather than using the task sequence GUI).

That's my quick and dirty way to use another server to deploy from. Good luck.