Automated Generic Operating System Installation and Maintenance (JACAL)

Microsoft Windows NT deployment and maintenance is one of the most time consuming tasks for systems administrators. The primary motivation for the JACAL project is to streamline this process by creating a set of free and open tools and guidelines for automating the installation and maintenance of one or more operating systems in large computing environments.1

It is well known that Windows NT workstations have subtle and potentially serious problems when they are duplicated from a disk image. These problems leave IT administrators with the task of manually setting up NT workstations or cobbling together a number of different automation methods which, in the end, still require the administrators to manually fill in the parts which the various automation tools leave out. Most large scale installation and maintenance tools do not provide solutions that solve the problem completely from boot to a completed build with minimal administrator intervention.

The JACAL project was developed at Taylor University's Computing and System Sciences Department. Our lab and classroom environment consists of 40 workstations that dual-boot Windows NT and Linux. We also have 5 dedicated Linux workstations, 12 dedicated NT workstations, and 7 faculty workstations. Each Windows NT setup has nearly 80 applications that are available to every user. Nearly 1 GB of application data is installed to the local hard drive and over 7 GB of application data is served to the workstations from the application server. Manual installation of these applications takes 25+ hours on a single machine. JACAL allows us to fully rebuild a workstation in under 2 hours with only a few minutes of administrator intervention.