I'm a techie in a small department at a uni, I take care of a few student labs as well as offering support to various staff members etc. In my spare time I've been optimizing the student images, taking out the crap bits, speeding em up, and adding useful software. I've also been working on automating the process wherever possible, and have gotten along pretty well. The machines (after being ghosted and auto rebooting into windows) set their own hostname and description, set up any batch files, desktop shortcuts and other machine specific settings that need to be run for the machines in that particular lab (or that specific machine), deep freeze themselves with a password set, then restart into the user targeted account.

All of this is well and good, but unfortunately as things stand I still have to walk around to all the machines, and have them boot off cdroms to join the ghost session. I've been searching for some way to have the machines boot off a remote server by default, or something similar, so I can power on the machines with WOL, have them auto login to a ghost session, reboot themselves and set themselves up, then shut them all down (probably just with psshutdown) without leaving my office.

PXE would be good, but unfortunately we aren't in a position to change our network infrastructure at all, so getting access to the dhcp server is out of the question.

What I had in mind is this, a small bootloader on the main hdd of the ghost image, that by default runs software to (a)load network drivers, (b) do some kind of authentification, or merely a file comparison check to a remote windows share, in order to determine whether or not to begin a ghost session. If the file check/authentification fails, the machine would simply continue on with it's normal boot cycle. Thus I could set up a process or share on the ghostcast machine, then power on the labs remotely and have them login without my physical assistance.

It boils down to the following: Is this feasible? Do you know of any good tools /guides/examples to get this going? And are there any better alternatives?

Been googling it but I've been having a hard time trying to think of the right keywords to find the info I need...

What I was thinking is when the systems boot up with WOL they are set to boot off dhcp server ( ie boot off network in BIOS ). Then from there you can work your magic with whatever you need to do - point them to a multicast server.

What version of Ghost are you running?

As Skitza said; it's probably the easiest and best way that I had found to do Ghost imaging. I beleive we were using Ghost Corporate 7.5 and all the relevant manuals taught us to set it correctly.

We had the multicast server image each machine every 30 days also with any updates we had done to the master image.