System Imaging and Deployment

RIS Server Setup notes

I had some fun setting up RIS on the newly repurposed server “SYSIMG1”.

One issue is that copying all of the RIS Images from the current production “RISPRIME” would not complete… I ran out of space on the target volume which is the same size as the source volume. Why? Because RIS runs the “groveler.exe” service to create hardlinks for duplicate files in RIS images. My file copy utilities just copy the hardlinks as separate files, and thus I run out of space.

Presumably forcing the groveler to startup on the target volume will free up the space needed to complete the transfers… but how to do this? Groveler.exe has no command line support, and has a hard-configured schedule on which it runs (2am or some such). I want it to run now!.

Some searching reveals the following KB article:
https://premier.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;247611

I will see if I can find this grovctrl.exe utility of legend. Sounds like just what I need.

Also found some good docs at MIT:
http://web.mit.edu/ist/topics/windows/server/winmitedu/whatsRIS.htm
and berkeley:
http://www-w2k.cs.berkeley.edu/admin/docs/docs/dhcpris.txt