[Dech]

Just came back to work after an 8 month parental leave, and lemme tell you something, I feel completely LOST.

So lost, that I require serious help

Anyways, I can't remember for the life of me how to stamp a "timebomb" into my unattended installs!

I remember a small executable that encrypted a date that you plugged in the winnt.sif, and at that date it would "kill" XP.

The name of it? Dunno. The section in winnt.sif where it went? No clue.

Yes, I'm that lost.

Help!

Thanks!

[Zxian]

Wha...?

Your saying you had an application that would make the install no longer work after the specified date?

Why would you want to do this?

[muevelonyc]

in the deploy.cab, run the setupmgr.exe

There a portion to put your registry key it and encypt it, and limit the install of it until X amount of days. Create the unattend.txt and copy the lines for the key and the EncrpytedPass=YES to your existing winnt.sif / unattend.txt

[Jito463]

That method will cause the preinstall CD/DVD to stop functioning after a specified date, but will not affect any machines which have already been setup using that disc.

[Dech]

Ok, my setupmgr doesn't have any options whatsoever to encrypt or add a time limt in any of the menus... neither the one from the original WXP CD of the one I downloaded from MS.com (different dates & size, so I thought that was my problem, but alas!)

And the reason I need a timebomb is because we have had in the past (and still do) LAN admins that used test or pre-production images with old software/drivers & even BETA VERSIONS of Windows 2000 out in the field. Made for some very complicated troubleshooting by our 3rd level support.

We are way behind in our OS deployements (as always, **** funding) and we still run 2k SP4 on 40000 desktops, my group has been pushing for an XP push for a long time and it looks as it's finally fallen on open ears. We know we will release many versions for developpers to test their apps, drivers, etc... before hitting full production environment.

We need a timebomb option, hardcoded ('cause we could potentially hide a registry key and use login scripts to check for version and deny loging on the domain if the version doesn't match our national production release, wanted something more hardcoded than that).

There has to be a way to mimic the eval copies of some Windows versions/copies. It just so happens that all our damned MS reps are on vacation, and their backups are anything but helpful on the replies.

So as usual, I turn to the technical community for help!