A Sysprep primer - beginning with a tip on random machine names

[leavitron]

I found an old thread that started to evolve into a sysprep primer, but the thread was closed. I thought I would start a new one and start it off with the tip I wanted to post in that old thread.

The old thread can be found here: thread94-363751

The post I am referencing is this:

you get 2 options with sysprep for the computer name-

1. let it generate some random computer name
2. specify the name

if you specify the name in sysprep.inf then every system will be named that, which means they won't be unique.

so you have to use the 'generate computer name' and then look into writing/moifying a VB script to rename the system.

i've always thought that the COMPUTER NAME option is a weakness of sysprep. you should be able to at least specify part of the computer name and have some of it randomly generated.

This isn't necessarily the case. In our organization, we have been able to use a combo of a fixed prefix with random character suffix in machine name generation. Here is how it is laid out:

[UserData]
; ProductID=(removed)
FullName="Tablet v1.0"
OrgName="001T"
ComputerName=*

In this format, the beginning of the computer name will always be "001T-" with the dash automatically added. Then, the rest of the computer name is random characters appended to the end to make a 15 character machine name. So, if you include an OrgName field, you will end up with a combination of fixed characters and random characters.

This works well for us because we are a chain of charter schools and we track each school's assets by school accounting number. The prefix of the machine name is that school number.

NOTE: This is done using Sysprep v2 for Windows XP SP2, files dated 8/3/2004. It has worked for us with all revisions of Sysprep v2 and I believe v1.1.