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KACE KBOX 2000 Series
by Bob Kelly

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Unattended Installations

To obtain media for installations, the KBOX 2000 series prompts you to feed it physical CDs which it uses to create a library of ISO images from which you may select when creating jobs for unattended installations. The process is simple and fairly quick, but if (like me) you have a library of ISO images yourself, you’ll need to burn them to CD for use by the KBOX as there is currently no mechanism in place to upload ISO images of your own.

If you have one already, an unattended installation file may be used or you may go through a very simple web wizard to create one of your own. To keep things quick and easy, there are many unattended options missing from the wizard. In the end, you are presented with the resulting unattend.txt file and may edit it right in the display (so if you know what you want, you are not really limited from taking full advantage of all that is possible with an unattended installation). If there is room for improvement here, it would be to offer an optional “advanced wizard” to walk you through more of the options possible and to base the choices provided on the version of Windows with which you are working.

The KBOX 2000 series does not support Vista yet, but this support is expected to release some time during the first half of 2007. KBOX 2000 currently provides support for the unattended installation of Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server.
 
The KBOX 2000 series makes quick work of unattended installations, which are often the preferred mechanism for Windows rollouts when there is a mixed base of desktop hardware in the organization. This is because the unattended installation process has no HAL dependencies and, as long as the drivers are present, it can handle most any hardware configuration you may face.

Application Deployment

When I hear the term application "slipstreaming" I think of a process whereby the files and registry entries are merged into that of the target-- in this case Windows. While I have not seen a product capable of that (at least not prior to Vista), the KBOX 2000 Series is not far off: the setups are actually merged into your target Windows distribution, where they are then called upon following installation. As you can see by the image here, this is a fairly integrated process. You can instruct your unattended installation to automatically log on a specified number of times, which means this entire process can be truly unattended. The KBOX is simply taking advantage of automation features provided by Windows, but it does so in a very intuitive way which (particularly for those not savvy with the unattended process) is invaluable to taking full advantage of these capabilities.

To get applications installed as part of your unattended deployment of Windows, you need only specify a file, it's command line installation parameters and with which unattended installations you want it included. When you add a new application install from the web console, the file specified is uploaded, placed in the necessary folder structure and the command line is added to the unattended installation of Windows. At this time you must specify a file to be uploaded, but I’m told this will be updated in the future for those cases where you wish to run an existing command and have no associated file you want to copy.

In a very clever move, the KBOX 2000 Series includes support for zip files so that you can have one file to upload for an installation that may require many files and folders. You still need only identify the command line for the installation as the KBOX will handle decompression. When you use a zip file in this way, the installation process will decompress and change to the directory automatically for execution of your specified command line.
  

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