I’m looking for a really good book/tutorial/FAQ on how network administrators can use login scripts to automate software installs over a network. I’ve been learning lots about other admin areas but I’ve never tried this aside from mapping network drives.
Does anyone know of a good resource (paid or not) that I can use to learn how this process works? Thanks in advance!
Interesting…so you need an SMS server to do this? I had thought that using the already present login script function in Server 2003 there would be a way to do software installs without any other technology…was I off base?
If you’re trying to automate installing software on end-user PCs, do NOT mess with scripts.
Read up on ms technet about “publishing” and “assigning” applications via GPO.
And no, you don’t need SMS. It’s darn handy for mongo-complicated multi-hundred PC situations, but can be overkill if you just want to stuff Word and some LOB app onto each PC and keep it up to date.
I’m pretty sure the [publish/assign via GPO] technique can also be used for force-feeding software onto servers; I’ve just never had occasion to try it.