Superior RIS: Deploying Alternative OSs

The wizard's third panel asks whether you have a boot file image that you want to use or whether you want to create one. A boot file image is nothing more than a standard International Organization for Standardization (ISO)­format image file. RIS Menu Editor lets you create RIS menu options for ISO-format image files that you've used other shareware utilities to create. However, 3Com bundled an ISO imaging utility into RIS Menu Editor, so you can simply click Create to make an image on the spot. Clicking Create brings you to the Create Boot Image File dialog box that Figure 2 shows. If you enter the filename that you want to give the disk image and click OK, the utility uses default options to make the image file (the default options are adequate for your initial test). After you click OK, RIS Menu Editor makes an ISO-format image file of the disk in your A drive.

When the imaging process is complete, the View Image File window appears, listing your disk image's files. Figure 3 shows this window for an image file I created from a Windows NT installation disk; if you use a plain vanilla bootable disk, far fewer files will appear in the window. The View Image File interface lets you easily move around within the image file and make necessary changes, such as adding and deleting files.

RIS Menu Editor writes ISO-format image files to your system's \remoteinstall\setup\<language>\tools\3com\i386 directory. RIS Menu Editor also writes a file called tooln.ldr to this directory. This file follows Microsoft's .sif file format (as I mentioned in the previous Superior RIS articles, .sif files are key components of RIS functionality). After the wizard writes your ISO-format image file, you're finished with the RIS Menu Editor utility for a while.

The AD Tools Option
If you were to test RIS from a client system at this point, you wouldn't see your disk image as a Maintenance and troubleshooting tools option. In fact, you wouldn't see the Maintenance and troubleshooting tools option at all. RIS's default installation disables this menu option and hides it from users. To enable installing users to see this menu and the installation options that you've used RIS Menu Editor to create, you need to manually enable the Tools option within Active Directory (AD).

Open the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in. Find and right-click your RIS server's site, domain, or organizational unit (OU). Select Properties from the resulting menu. Select the Group Policy tab, then highlight the list's uppermost policy and click Edit to launch the Group Policy console. Navigate through the console to the User Configuration\Windows Settings\Remote Installation Services container. In the details pane, double-click the Choice Options icon. The resulting dialog box will be similar to the one that Figure 4 shows. Click Allow in the Tools section, then click Apply to apply the policy to your AD structure.

As long as this group policy covers the installing user, the Client Installation Wizard's first menu will show the Maintenance and troubleshooting tools option (and your disk image installation options therein). If the user falls outside of the group policy you've defined, you need to apply an additional policy for the site or OU that contains the user.

If you've properly configured the policy, the Client Installation Wizard's main menu will show the Maintenance and troubleshooting tools option when you boot a RIS client to check your work. When you select this option, the wizard will give you another option to run your bootable disk routine. After you select the option to boot your disk image, the disk routine runs, and you end up at a command prompt (or wherever the disk's routine is programmed to bring you) without ever needing to insert a disk in the local drive. (When you test RIS Menu Editor functionality, use only disk images that don't execute destructive commands such as Format C:\.)

If this test doesn't run as it should, check your work, but also be forewarned: RIS Menu Editor is incompatible with some disks (but should work flawlessly with your plain vanilla bootable disks). Other disks require you to tweak the utility before you can make them RIS installation options.

What Works and What Doesn't
Overall, RIS Menu Editor is flexible and easy to use. Possible uses for the utility are endless. However, in the course of using RIS Menu Editor to make images of every bootable disk I could get my hands on, I ran into a few problems.

By default, RIS Menu Editor makes an image of only one disk per image file. So, what can you do when a routine uses multiple disks? To make one disk image of more than one disk, you need to use RIS Menu Editor's Advanced Image Settings. The Create Boot Image File dialog box (which appears in the Create Menu Wizard after you choose to create a disk image) gives you an Advanced option. Advanced settings that you can configure include an image capacity setting. Figure 5 shows an extended size of 6MB, which, in effect, creates a 6MB bootable disk.

After you make an image of the first disk, RIS Menu Editor takes you back to the View Image File window. From this window, you can easily add the other disks' files to complete the image. Typically, putting the contents of all my source disks into this virtual multimegabyte disk was a successful tweak. However, success depended on how the first disk's programs executed and interacted with files that span disks.

Some disks simply aren't bootable through RIS, and other disks boot but not correctly. For example, when I tried to make images of BIOS upgrade disks and run them from the RIS client, the BIOS upgrade routines locked up. Also, the three disks for an NT Workstation installation didn't want to boot from the Client Installation Wizard. Not all BIOS upgrade or OS installation disks will suffer these problems (which seemed to correlate with memory contention). You need to test each disk to know how it will perform.

Highest-Level Superiority
I commend 3Com for making such a great tool and, moreover, for making it free. RIS Menu Editor takes RIS to its highest level, to the point at which you can develop bootable disks that serve your individual needs, image them, then put them on the RIS Client Installation Wizard menu. You no longer need to carry a DOS bootable disk or a bootable PowerQuest PartitionMagic disk. Thanks to RIS Menu Editor, you can store images of these disks on your RIS server, and store the disks in your desk drawer.