Am planning to. Only problem is the initial creation of the DHCP reservations: it's extremely tedious to do this by hand
We do it by hand. It is tedious, but not too bad. Boot Rom or PXE machines display their MAC address on the screen, then we scribble it down on an old punch card, sneaker-net it into the other room where dhcpd.conf is almost permanently in vi, copy it in, save, rerun. On some systems the only way we can identify the MAC address is to watch the complaints on the DCHP log file, as we don't allow unregistered clients (and all addresses are fixed). We are trying to control everything through DHCP options, making the DHCP file our central asset register. Once it's in DHCP, the rest is almost completely automatic. Or will be, on the new system we are working on, when (if?) we have worked out why it keeps mis-identifying the drive geometry.
On a bit of a tangent: I have managed to use DHCP to allocate computer names to Win2000 boxes. Win2K rollouts are now down to around 10 keypresses, although the method is based on Ghost and so is flawed for reasons I have outlined elsewhere.
We are about to bite this one. We hope we can do it by executing a .reg file on bootup, because that seems the only way we can edit the registry. We can create the .reg file in a script. We are trying to avoid Ghost, and operate entirely through network downloads (i.e. no CDs). Takes about two hours for an initial install, but a breeze (we hope) thereafter. -- Christopher Dawkins, Felsted School, Dunmow, Essex CM6 3JG 01371-822698/821076 or 07798 636725 cchd@felsted.essex.sch.uk