Servers

I’ll be honest. Ubuntu’s autoinstall system took me a while to fully wrap my head around. Even after doing a full Microsoft Deployment Toolkit series, this one still put up a fight. But after plenty of trial and error, I finally got a setup that works reliably and exactly the way I want.

After years of tinkering with self-hosted services-on and off for the better part of a decade, the whole homelab movement opened my eyes to just how much more I could be doing. So when the opportunity came with a new house build, I decided it was the perfect time to rethink everything from the ground up. I sat down and sketched out a proper wish list:

• all the things I wanted my reimagined homelab to handle,
• the problems I wanted to solve,
• and the kind of setup I wished I’d had years ago.

Introduction

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) is a free tool for automating Windows OS deployments. It is sort of a scaled down SCCM if you like, with a focus on imaging. At an enterprise level, you will likely use SCCM, but for smaller companies, MDT might just do the trick, and even at home :-)

From part 1, we got all the tools we needed and are now ready to start installing MDT and getting started on our first reference image.

In part 2, we installed everything and got out first task sequence working. Now lets go further and finish off our reference image.

Now that we have captured our first reference image, we can import this reference image and start creating our production image right? Well, let do some reference image clean up first.