We've been running GSS 2.5 for quite some time now and have it set up more or less as we wish.
Now we're testing GSS 3.0 (HF5) on a Windows Server 2012 R2 as we will be getting a slew of Windows 10 laptops later in the year, which need to be imaged.
We're not really getting along with the Altiris/GSS Console, though.
We have a test client laptop with the DAgent installed, which shows up in our "All Computers" and "Dynamic Machine Groups"-"No Automation Folder Installed" groups. When we try to run a Create Image job on this client it reboots twice and then stalls with Status Code 116 and "Unable to boot to Windows automation". If we reboot the machine and manually choose to boot from the NIC it latches onto the PXE server and starts grabbing the requested image.
(The image is being split into 2GB chunks though the receiving folder/share is NTFS and we've set the -SPLIT=0 parameter on the Create Image job. It seems it's not an uncommon problem as a quick Google search has shown. We'll probably be adding a separate question about this later unless someone has a quick solution for this up their sleeve.)
We've run the Boot Disk creator and created an automation folder installation, and remotely installed the Automation Folder on the test client. However, this creates a boot menu with a 30 second timer on the client which lets the user choose between the original OS installation and the Altiris Pre Boot Environment.
We've tried looking through the configuration of the automation configuration a number of times but we can't find any way of disabling it there. We're aware that we can use System Configuration or similar tools, but this seems unnecessary and we can't understand why our users should even be exposed to these alternatives.
Is the thinking that every image or deployment job should be a number of steps starting with remotely installing the automation folder and then running whichever jobs needed running and finishing with uninstalling the automation folder again? This seems extremely convoluted and error prone.
On the GSS 2.5 there was no need of an automation folder on the clients. Our understanding is that part of the image or deployment jobs was copying the automation environment on to the participating clients and removing it again at the end of a job.
What we would like is, if possible, to have a similar experience with GSS 3.0 where the jobs automatically handle the booting into the automation environment.
Or if this is not possible to have a non-intrusive automation environment on the clients. I.e. no boot menu to confuse our users.
Kind regards
Kim Laage