Dell's "Server Assistant" CD?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Gerry Hickman
  • Start date Start date
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Gerry Hickman

Hi,

I'm looking at building a Dell server, but should I create my own
bootable CD with latest SPs, patches and their drivers, or should I use
their "Server Assistant" CD?
 
The Server Assistant CD-ROM has an easy to use configuration for the
RAID and operting system that creates an automated installation of the
operating system for you. It has all of the drivers necessary to get
your system running without any intervention from you. It will also
give you the option to install the latest service pack after the
installation is complete. The CD-ROM does NOT contain any operating
system files beyond Dell drivers, so you must supply your own
operating system CD-ROM and product ID.
 
Thanks Rick and Brian,

Everyone is basically saying to use the CD, so if I don't I'll have to
make damn sure I know what I'm doing!

I agree there's some nice aspects to their CD; the drivers are there,
the unattend is there and the oem txtsetup stuff, but as you say you
have to provide your own O/S; it's a lot of messing around by the time
you've inserted CDs and then service packs, patches and so on.

The reason I was considering my own bootable CD was a kind of disaster
recovery fall back. If I can't restore the O/S from tape for some
reason, I could get most of it back to a good patch level with all my
hardware ready to go by just inserting _one_ CD. If I use a re-writable,
I should be able to keep it up to date. The only other reason for this,
is that I want to build and destroy it about 4 times and this would
speed up that process.

However, I don't like the prospect of moving all their proprietary stuff
to my own build; they've got cmdlines.txt that use regini (custom reg
keys). Eeek!
 
Gerry Hickman said:
However, I don't like the prospect of moving all their proprietary
stuff to my own build; they've got cmdlines.txt that use regini
(custom reg keys). Eeek!
Click to expand...

Have you looked at those carefully? I vaguely recall them being no
big deal (just setting things like the NTP server).

- Pat
http://unattended.sourceforge.net/
 
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