Using UDF with unattended installation

[Guest]

I am wanting to run several unattended installations to build basic Windows
XP systems on several machines up to 200 machines over a weekend. I have made
an unattended answer file to handle all of what I need apart from Computer
Name and product key as these obviously are diferent on each machine.

The only way of achieving this as far as I know is to use a udf file to hold
the unique data. I think I can figure out how to use a ufd file to randomly
allocate unique computer name and product key to my client PC's but I need to
be able to spcify which clients gets which computer name and product key from
the database and wondered if there was some way I could tie a computer name
to a mac address for example so that I can control where product keys and
computer names go.

Any suggestions of where I might find out how to achieve this either with a
udf or in some other way.

Thanks.

 

[Patrick J. LoPresti]

Well, the other way is to have your boot disk generate unattend.txt
before launching Windows Setup.

Our system lets you set the product key, machine name, and other
things by looking up the MAC address in a spreadsheet or a database.
This particular feature is not well-documented, because it is
relatively new and the documentation is old. But it works and we have
users who rely upon it.

See <http://unattended.sourceforge.net/>. You can always ask on our
mailing list if you get stuck...

- Pat