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Is Wireless Supported?

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We have a large number of classrooms which are wireless.  We've been trying to find out if Snap Deploy 5 has the ability to work over wi-fi, and if so, to what degree.   A) deployment of a image only, B) deploy + auto renaming or better, deploy + renaming + domain join.

We're testing with a 30-day trial at this point, and need a couple questions answered befroe we determine if it's fiable.  Or current wireless setup requires a passcode.

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Unfortunately no, not to my knowldege.  The computers need to be able to PXE boot and that is only available via a physical NIC.  I believe you'll find this to be a limiting factor for other backup and deployment applications as well.

A work-a-round (but far from a solution) would be to create bootable recover media (disk or USB drive) and boot each computer to it and push the image from a locally attached hard drive that already has the image on it.  Nice thing about Snap deploy, is that the image creator can create images to a local disk and then the "stand-a-lone" application.  Of course, you could techncially do this with ATIH instead of Snap Deploy as well, but Snap Deploy has the added benefit of being able to generalize systems on the fly (ATIH must use Universal restore afterwards) and Snap Deploy can do SID changing on the fly for Active Directory environments as well.

I'm not sure about the exact licensing requirements either, but snap deploy offline media works on any system that boots up to it and does not require the use of one of your Snap Deploy licenses from the server console. 

Thanks.  Yes, so far have not seen 'wireless' anywhere.

We've been using True Image with either exteral HD's or through a network storage device (FreeNAS) up to this point.  Works fine, but requires a good bit of time per lab / classroom.  The major benefit with Snap Deploy, for us, would be the auto renaming and domain join.  Both of these stages take up a lot of time when done manually.  We have several options in the wireless classrooms, either conintue to do manually or temporarily put these on the network via a portable switch and some cables.

The other issue at hand is Unicast v. Multicast.  The latter is currently failing (imediately).   Based on speaking with one of our network gurus, our network hardware can handle multicast and any required bandwith.  We have a conference call with an Acronis Team from one of the platinum partners tomorrow.  We'll see.   Thanks again!   (Tom)

If you have the ability to tie a physical switch to a classroom wireless access point, running cables to the systems would probably be a good solution, still not entirely wireless, but would still give you the domain join features then.  It's just a matter of getting that PXE boot connectivity started so that you can run the rest of the deployment tasks throught the managemnet console and limit the hands on work.  

I'm not that astute with networking, but you might be able to have those local class switches set on their own VLAN to help limit unicast problems.  We've DOS'd our local network on accident because of a UNICAST broadcast storm so we moved the Snap Deploy server to it's own VLAN segment (it still has access to the full network though) and then the Acronis traffic from PXEboot only gets passed along that VLAN path.