Few years ago I had a government project to set up computer labs with hundreds of computers. Setting up computer labs is not as simple as hiring people to unpack the computers and set it to tables. It also includes installing third party software such as Adobe, Macromedia, Autodesk and etc which they purchased. Installing software from PC to PC is a very boring job and takes a lot of time. When you’ve done installing, you have to key in the very long serial number with random letters and numbers on every computer and then test the software to make sure that it’s working.

Well instead of doing that, I could just install one computer, make sure that everything is fully working and then clone it to other computers via network. What we need to do first is to create a file server, boot up the client machine with a network bootdisk to connect to the file server and then run the dos based imaging software (eg; Symantec Ghost) from there. Windows server can do that but security has to be downgraded to allow the bootdisk’s old Win3.1 era client to connect. If you don’t do much cloning at once, then you could get away with using a 2000/XP workstation, however there’s the 10 connection licensing limitations on the file sharing within the OS, in order to force you to useing the most experience “server” solutions.

So the best method is to grab an old machine that is not necessarily powerful and install a free linux operating system called SME Server to act as the file server. You’ll be surprised how easy it is to set it up.

First Step: Installing SME Server
1. Download the latest version of SME Server in ISO image and burn it to a CD.

2. Boot your computer with the SME Server installation CD.

3. Type sme and hit the enter key.

4. You can hit the skip button if your disc burning software has verified the CD after burning.

5. Select your language.

6. Select your keyboard model.

7. Click YES when you see a warning window telling you that “All disks will be reformatted and any data will be lost. Proceed?”

8. Select your time zone.

9. I will start to format your hard drive and install SME server. After finished installation, eject your CD and click the Reboot button.

Second Step: Initial SME Server configuration
1. At first boot up, you’ll be prompted if you wish to restore from backup. Select No.

2. Enter an admin password. If the password you entered is very common and doesn’t contain special characters, you’ll be warned that it is not a good choice. However you can click the No button to proceed.

3. Type in the admin password again as verification.

4. Enter primary domain name for your server. You can enter anything because it’s not really that important.

5. Enter the system name or we normally call it as computer name in Windows.

6. Enter the internal local IP address. You should consult your network administrator if you don’t know your local network IP range.

7. Enter local subnet mask.

8. Select “Server-only” for operation mode.

9. Enter the gateway IP address. Normally the gateway IP address is the IP of your router where your local area network gets the Internet from.

10. Select Off for DHCP server configuration. DHCP is a service that assigns IP address to computers that are connected to network. Most routers already have DHCP service enabled so you can turn this one off.

11. Enter DNS if required.

12. Select Yes to activate changes. When you see a black console screen asking for login, you don’t really need to do anything here. However if you wish to login, login with the username as admin and the password which you set in step 2.

Step 3: Adding Users to Login to SME Server
1. On another computer which is connected to the same network as the SME server, open the web browser and type the web address http://SMEServerComputerName/server-manager/ . Replace the SMEServerComputerName that you set in step 5 during initial configuration.

2. Login as the user admin and with the password that you supplied.

3. Select Workgroup from Configuration on the left hand sidebar. Set the workgroup and make sure that it’s the same as other Windows computer on the local network and click Save.

4. Select Users from Collaboratrion and click the Add user account button.

5. Fill in the account name, first name, last name and click Add.

6. Click Reset password for this new account and set a password. By default the account is locked so you need to set a password to activate it. The SME server is a little fussy on password as it requires a password with upper case letter, lower case letter, number, non-alphanumeric character and be at least 7 characters long. An example would be Raycc8!.

Now a user from the local network can log in to the file server with his account by simply going to Run, type \\ServerName\ and then login with the account that you’ve just added. There are other configurations for you to play around and trust me, they’re easy to configure because it’s web based configuration. The minimum system requirements to install SME Server is 400MHz processor with 256MB ram. Recommended system would be 1.5GHz processor with 512MB ram.

If you’re wondering how did I clone the computers, I used NetBootDisk to boot up hundreds of computers and connect to SME file server. Then I run Norton Ghost from the server to create the first image and dump it in the shared folder. The rest then connects and restore from the image.

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