Deployment Solution

Hi All,

Got a real odd one.  Our Altiris server has been working fine for ages.  However recently it started to do some odd things.  Basically, if you assigned a job to a new PC, the tasks within that job will be blank.  If you reboot the server,  the tasks reapear and the job runs ok.

I tried to reinstall the Deployment server and this didn't fix the problem.  I uninstalled the server totally but this only caused more problems as I wasn't able to even reinstall the DS.

Luckilly, I had a spare server sitting around doing nothing.  So I have done the following to it.

1) Installed 2008r2 and SQL 2008 SP1
2) Installed DS 6.9 SP3

So now with a totally blank database, no PC's but just my old imported jobs, I still get the same problem.

Symantec support have remoted onto my server and they have said they can see no problems with my setup.  We even reinstalled DS again whilst they were connected.  The support chap is going to speak to the US to see if they have any ideas.

Has anyone seen this problem before.  My current setup is

Dell Poweredge R300, 12GB Ram
Server 2008r2 64bit
SQL 2008 Standard 64bit with SP1
DS 6.9 SP3

Any help greatly received.

Many thanks

Obvious question: What do the failing jobs look like?  That seems to be the only constant.

They can be any jobs.  We started to notice it with imaging jobs since that generally the first things we do with a new PC.  But if you assign any job, even a simple script to do a "dir", this appears as blank (no tasks displayed inside the job).  A quick reboot or restart of the Altiris services and the tasks appear.  The Symantec tech who's been helping me even delved deep into the SQL database and could see the jobs assigned ok.  It's just that the tasks don't display and therefore, won't run anything.

It seems to have gotten Symantec stumped.  I now considering building another server with Windows 2003r2 and SQL 2005 to see if that works.  It has to surely?!!

I know this is a long shot, because it's that time of year. Try scheduling a job an hour or two before the current time. The scheduler will warn you but just let it go.

It's similar to an issue we encountered.

Another problem that we encountered was an issue with PXE and NULL Serial numbers, when Serial Numbers are used as the UUID, but I thought that would/had been resolved in SP3. I know we had this issue, and ended up with a dev build executable that fixed the UUID issue but caused a Daylight Savings Time issue, which is why I remember both of these issues.

https://kb.altiris.com/article.asp?article=42244&p=1

Sorry, realized I wasn't extremely clear.

The PXE and Null Serial Numbers issue would cause PXE to keep reconnecting to the Axengine.exe and causing it to slow down and jobs were not processing. So we could schedule jobs, but they wouldn't never start processing.

So, we received a dev build axengine.exe to fix that issue, and it had some issues with Daylight Savings time and we would have to schedule jobs a couple hours early to get them to run immediately, for 3 weeks until the issue resolved itself.

Can someone tell me, if you create a new PC and assign a imaging job to that PC, do you see the tasks within that job?

If so, which Server OS, SQL version and DS version are you using.

Thanks

 We've had this problem, the tasks in the jobs do eventually appear, l have just been putting it down to an overworked and underpowered server.

DS6.9 SP3, SQL 2005 SP3 (seperate server), WinPE pre-boot.

I  have seen it happen on imaging jobs, as well as post build jobs