We are using WDSMCast.exe to image our computers with Multicast. I do not want to put the password for the command in plane text. WDSMCast says that if you don't specify the /username parameter, it uses the current user credentials. Those happen to the be the system account from Windows PE for a non-domain computer. If it were a domain computer, I might be able to specify "domain computer" as a permission on the reminst share. But alas, I cannot.
WDSMCast.exe is being run from a \\server\deployment share. The drive is being mapped to letter I using a password encryptor tool (loginw.exe). The I drive maps to the same server that WDS is installed to. When I run WDSMcast.exe without specifying the /username parameter, it uses the same credentials to connect to the\\server\reminst share. It can access all the wim image files on there, but I'm guessing it then fails to authenticate to the transport server with the error "Can't find the file specified".
When I do specify the username parameter, it complains about multiple connections to the same server, even though the same account is used here as was used on the drive map.
I understand that I can add wdsmcast to the boot image so I don't have to map a drive to that. However, there are other scripts, as well as driver stores on the non-reminst share that are needed before and after the multicasting command. There is only one deployment server per site and I do not want to pull drivers and other software over the WAN.
So, is there any way to disable authentication on the transport server such that a non-domain system account from WinPE can connect to and image from a WDS server? I would imagine that if imaging must be done from WinPE that Microsoft allowed for this. I remember back in the Ghost days you didn't need any credentials to connect to a Ghost multicast session.