How to build an image without active internet connection?

[dkrikun]

Hello,

I would like to build, say Windows 7/8.1 image, on a Windows 7 host, in a sneakernet. Could you please give some general steps of what needs be done to get it work?

Thanks a lot :smiley:

[kensykora]

I assume by Sneakernet you mean running the build on a box that has no network access. Just off the top of my head, some preliminary items you'd have to have downloaded onto media and copied over:

1. The Windows 7 and 8.1 ISOs (check the json files in the root for the URLs)
2. Packer installer
3. Virtualbox and/or VMWare Installer
4. VM Guest Tools (check scripts/vm-guest-tools.bat)
5. Any files in the /scripts/ folder you need to use in your run, will want to check for hand-entered URLs and download those files

Then you'd do the following at least:

1. Install VMWare / Virtualbox
2. Install Packer
3. Change the paths to the ISO in windows_7.json / windows_81.json
4. Either change the autounattend.xml file to run a script to change the Windows Update source server to your local windows update server, (I'm not sure how to do this, nor have I ever done it) or just disable updates altogether by commenting out the update block and un-commenting out the no-updates block
5. Update the scripts/vm-guest-tools.bat to use the downloaded VM Tools you downloaded
6. From the step above, any files you downloaded that were referenced in /scripts you'll want to update the scripts to use the downloaded files instead.

That should be it but there might be a few things I overlooked. Feel free to submit a PR if you get the above working with documentation on how you got it to work.

[ferventcoder]

A good place to look would be https://github.com/jen20/packer-windows-netdev - James does this completely offline. I need to get the offline story for Chocolatey to be easier so that we can convert him back to using Chocolatey to do this.

[kensykora]

Closing, please reopen if you have any more questions on this.