Possible to Control Computer Names Assigned During Automated Installations

  • Thread starter Thread starter TS
  • Start date Start date
T

TS

I know you can insert a list computer names in the unattended setup
file, but it then radomly names the machines using the names from the
file.
What if you need each PC to always get the same name assigned without
manually renaming them?
Is this possible? Can the XP setup differentiate the individual
machines by mac address or something else and assign the names based
on that?
 
TS,

I'm not aware of any truly native way to do this. It's a problem I've run
into many times myself. One of the solutions I've used in the past is to
allow Windows to randomly name the computer, and then automatically logon as
the administrator, and run a VBscript which gets the MAC address and checks
against a database for the PC name. The script then changes the computer
name (I've always used NETDOM from Windows Server 2003 - there's supposedly
a WMI way to do it, but I've never gotten it to work correctly), and reboots
the PC.
 
Same here - we had a QuickBasic program that prompted for specific info for
the computer (medical company - had different set-ups for doctors and
nurses) the modified the files and started an image download with the proper
information. (this was with NT4 workstations)

--
Mike Matheny

Mike Knight said:
I work at a college and we are currently working on this problem. We
Click to expand...
currently have a small program that launches before our imaging software and
requires us to input the name then it writes out a customzied sysprep.inf.
This is the only way we have currently hae found to work around this...but
this too is a pain. If any one got a better idea, let's here it.
 
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