Cloning drives
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@flabdablet said in Cloning drives:
Only an issue for the first 25 boxes attached to any given KMS server AFAIK. After that it doesn't care.
That's not my experience; you still have duplicate CMIDs and brokenness, but I don't really care to argue it any further. shrug
Because as the Windows Server core team put it: "Images deployed without using Sysprep to prepare the image are not supported by Microsoft [emphasis mine]. Sysprep executes ~30 sysprep providers. These providers are written to correct issues with various components when you duplicate the installation. By not running sysprep it is unknown what types of issues you could encounter and many components will be in a broken state. The supported solution is to rebuild the image using the Sysprep /generalize switch and redeploy the systems."
When you're dealing with a client or customer, cutting corners and handing over an unsupported configuration is not the right thing to do. In the enterprise world, it can result in missing SLAs, contract breach or penalties, getting fired, or worse:
Just my PSA.
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@flabdablet said in Cloning drives:
Since acquiring this toy I have yet to encounter a machine with a BIOS too braindead to allow booting from it.
But to be fair they were pretty old, and expected USB-bootable media to show itself as a generic mass storage device (So mounting a "flash drive" image would work just fine, but not ISO).
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@flabdablet said in Cloning drives:
@heterodox said in Cloning drives:
I have seen problems with licensing and activation if you don't generalize (especially when using a KMS server)
Only an issue for the first 25 boxes attached to any given KMS server AFAIK. After that it doesn't care.
x100 It really sucks when you're testing KMS with only 12 machines in the office domain... Yay for tools that spoof clients!
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Cloning drives:
Yay for tools that spoof clients!
py-kms is way more reliable and way less trouble than the official MS KMS server, in my experience. Just Works.
Of course, that's largely because it makes absolutely no attempt to check whether or not you actually have a volume license arrangement in place; it's strictly a technical-enforcement workaround, so it has fewer failure modes than the official server. And obviously, anybody caught using it without a proper volume licensing agreement fully deserves the ensuing hurricane of piss.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Cloning drives:
they were pretty old, and expected USB-bootable media to show itself as a generic mass storage device (So mounting a "flash drive" image would work just fine, but not ISO).
That's the cute part though: in Optical Disk Drive mode, the Zalman enclosure actually presents as a USB CD/DVD drive. The target machine simply can't see the difference between an ISO image presented that way and a real disc in a real external optical drive, except that the virtual disc is way way quicker.
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@heterodox said in Cloning drives:
Images deployed without using Sysprep to prepare the image are not supported by Microsoft
Quite so, and if you're doing that then you completely deserve their lack of support.
Of course, it's also been my experience that MS support has never been worth a pinch of shit anyway, so you're not losing much.
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@flabdablet said in Cloning drives:
@Tsaukpaetra said in Cloning drives:
Yay for tools that spoof clients!
py-kms is way more reliable and way less trouble than the official MS KMS server, in my experience. Just Works.
Yeah. IIRC we did that, had it log the tickets to a file. If anyone comes around, we have the logs and license thingy to sync up with.
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@flabdablet said in Cloning drives:
The target machine simply can't see the difference between an ISO image presented that way and a real disc in a real external optical drive,
Unless it doesn't know how to boot usb-cdrom devices. Yeah, seriously have devices that can do flash drives, but not usb cdrom.
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