Thursday, February 5, 2009

More 2008 unattended woes

So as some may know, it's possible to present Windows updates (security hotfixes, etc) to the unattended setup in the windowsPE stage. Just open up your WSIM, go to Insert, and then Packages, and point to the folder containing your update cabs. Fix the xml file later to point to the actual network paths where those files will be at during the installation.

Problem: The install takes something around half an hour longer to install ~150MB of updates over a gigabit link. With the /tempdrive switch. WTF? Well, still better than integrating them into the install.wim... which doesn't work. I'll have to try to install them in post, which I have yet to succeed in.

Drivers can be presented in a similar manner, by using Microsoft-Windows-PnpCustomizationsWinPE/DriverPaths. Put your RAID drivers and whatever other drivers you need here.

Problem: The install failed back to the WinPE cmd prompt whenever I presented a path for the Intel Chipset drivers, with the entire network mapping becoming broken and requiring a reboot. After some poking and prodding, and looking at the full debug SAMBA logs, I noticed that it was mainly complaining about one file - 5400.inf. "Hmm, that's the same chipset that I'm using...", thought I. Apparently, Windows installs that chipset driver, which causes some sort of a reinitialization of the networking stack, causing the whole thing to fail horribly. Sigh. Chipset drivers go in postinstall. Unfortunately, the "unattended" setup for the drivers in question provides a nice dialog box to the effect of "everything was aok" on which you need to click to continue. /facepalm

Next up on the fail roll call is a nice error from stage 2 of the 2008 unattended installation process (after the first reboot): "Windows Setup encountered an internal error while loading or searching for an unattend answer file." This gem which produces no output whatsoever in setuperr.log. After a lot of trial and error, this was narrowed down to a setting the gateway on one of the network interfaces. Did I mention that the unattended parameters for that are completely unintuitive? "NextHopAddress"? "Prefix"? Sigh.

Sunday, February 1, 2009

What the deuce, Microsoft?

The most recent exclamation of that sort has arisen from the SNMP unattended configuration in Windows 2008. You see, configuring unattended SNMP settings in Windows 2003 was a fairly simple outpatient procedure, mostly documented in this somewhat old but for the most part still valid Microsoft KB. Personally, I found it too wordy for my tastes, and much rather read this file on an IBM website I found by chance while googling. Imagine that - nice documentation that is not from Microsoft on a Microsoft product¹. Oh, and being only able to put 3 hosts in the "Limit_Host" section does not apply to 2003. But I digress.

Getting back to the the topic at hand, I was building the SNMP unattended section for Windows 2008, when I encountered this: "You can configure only a single host with the A1 setting. Adding multiple hosts is not supported."

Adding multiple hosts is not supported.

Hwaht?! You took away a perfectly reasonable feature that was present in the unattend file of previous versions of Windows...why? Why must you do this to me Microsoft?²

P. S. Did I mention that I actually thought that doing unattended Windows 2008 would be simpler than unattended Windows 2003, because of the nicely documented and laid out Windows System Image Manager? I should have known better.


1. This is of course completely typical; most of the obscure Microsoft stuff can only be found in non-Microsoft places, with this exception.
2. Because it hates you and everything that you stand for. But we all knew that.