New to imaging, Questions about ZIS

[kevgo]

Hello there. I am a new PC tech at my local school district. I'm just starting to delve into the ever so fascinating world of Zenworks and am currently at an unclear understanding. The admin is ready and waiting to push out a setup that includes Windows Active Directory. As I've read and been lead to understand in the forums here Zenworks imaging by default is suppose to save ISD info when it does an image. Most notable is workstation name of course. I have noticed that when imaging off of the server directly this does not occur. However when I've imaged from one PC as a master to any number of others, it does occur. Is there special criteria that must happen for this to work? What I need to be able to do is image and not worry about losing PC name and the SID info, otherwise everytime we image, we will have to clear the SID info on the server and reset it on said computer(s). Any help is greatly appreciated.

Once you computers have been imported into Zenworks the computer name is maintained in the Image Safe Data (ISD) within the first 60ish sectors of the hard drive outside of the partitionable space. When you reimage the machine the zenworks agent picks up on and maintains the name of the computer in the ISD.

And the reverse is true in that changing the computer name, will change the computer name in the ISD on the next reboot. From within windows you can have a look with ziswin and from the bash prompt with zisview.

Likely overly simplified as the "Just Imaged Flag" influences the direction of the synchronization per se.

In short.. you may need to set the computer name once, but not for subsequent times when you reimage. Depending upon your naming scheme you may wish to grab a utility called 'wsname' and have it on your base image, and call it with the cmdlines.txt. This should give your computer a name based upon various criteria such as serial tag.. or IP or Mac Add, etc..

kevgo.