I guess one alternative to provisioning over the internet would be to have the computer provision itself. Is that possible?
I'm not sure what you mean about having the system provision itself.. You have to use some tool to provision it, either via writing your own Setup and Config Server, using the DTK "Director", using the
SCS Lite (6.0) for basic Enterprise, no TLS, or you can use the full SCS 5.1 or 6.0 - all these tools are available on our
Manageability community. The SCS Lite is very easy to use - I would suggest downloading them and reading through the documents and then see which one fits your needs the best. The SCS Lite tool uses the Activator too during the provisioning process and it has it's own utility for creating the setup.bin file for the USB key. You can also use the Activator GUI to provision your system locally. Again, there are quite a few different ways to provision a system so I would suggest downloading these tools and reading through their documentation so that you can get a feel for how they are different.
How many systems are you needing to provision? Are you requiring them to be in Enterprise Mode? (with or without TLS?) I need to test this, but I don't think you need to have a domain controller in order to provision.