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Comment by rciorba | Hacker News Reader

An interesting approach. When I worked at a university and had 100+ machines to handle (back in the WinXP days), we just used udpcast + sysprep to do full disk cloning. We never bothered with individual machines, if anything ever went wrong we just wiped the whole thing and re-cloned it.

Keeping 100+ machines up and running, and caring for individual ones sounds like a whole lot of work. Admittedly we got away with it because those were lab computers used by students, and data persistence did not matter as much (each student had a samba share mounted, which was on a central server and had backups)

I do wonder if full disk cloning + sysprep is still an option with newer versions of windows.

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In my own experience sysprep is not necessary anymore. In fact, we abandoned it because it seemed never to quite work properly anymore which leads me to believe that MS forgot it existed and broke it in some Win 10 update (Thanks guys! [I hate you]).

On modern networks and storage hardware, reimaging a PC from scratch is sometimes faster than rebooting Windows after an update (and always faster than a "feature" update).

Anyone looking into mass image deployment should check out Fog[0], because it is free and works pretty well.

[0] https://fogproject.org

Microsoft definitely didn't forget that sysprep exists, there's a decent sized group in azure that cares just about windows image creation and associated technologies. I think most of sysprep is simply considered "done".

We managed a bunch of small businesses, with sometimes completely different hardware, Windows versions etc. So unfortunately a lot of the larger scale/same local/VPN network IT management solutions wouldn't work for us.

My second job out of high school was at my school district as a PC Tech. I had the highest successful case closures of any technician because they all tried to fix the problem. I just moved the user's local docs to their network share, re-imaged the PC in 5-10 minutes, and copied their local docs back to their local folder. I had ~1000 desktops under my management between my 3 K-9 schools.

Worst job I have ever had though. The amount of politics that go on in a public school is ridiculous.

I thought most k12 were running stuff like Deep Freeze.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Freeze_%28software%29

This was 15 years ago. We had just rolled out Deep Freeze to a handful of labs across our district, but not to the teachers (who had local documents) and the 4 student PCs in the classrooms - yes each class had 5 PCs total.

Our problem with Deep Freeze was getting it to work nice with our locally installed software mixed our custom Novell stack that pushed software dynamically based on logged in users. So we relegated it to computer labs that had no local software.

Those were the days. Windows XP really was the sweet spot when it came to reliability and hackability. Sure, Windows 7 was more stable, but also much more opaque. Although I never cloned machines, I did automate the hell out of installs. When it finally worked, it felt like a miracle. Boot from PXE and enjoy the show. I was happy to discover that the most important tool I used back then can still be found on the internet: http://unattended.sourceforge.net.

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