Deployment Solution

I've looked and can't find anything on this, maybe I'm not looking in the right places.....

Deploying Windows 7 and Server images on brand new virtual machines with a custom unattend.xml. In the specialize pass I have the following

<component name="Microsoft-Windows-Shell-Setup" processorArchitecture="@ProcessArchitecture" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<ComputerName>@compName</ComputerName>
<ProductKey>@license</ProductKey>
</component>

Unfortunately the @compname token resolves to something like VMware-4227e4f307b462bb-42be5b7ff38ce02d. Sysprep tends to barf on hostnames greater than 15 chars in length. What is the default unattend.xml processing doing to truncate the name and how do I get the same results?

(Yes, I know that using Predefined Computers resolves this... but I really dont want to go down that route.)

Running ITMS 7.5 SP1 - no hotfixes.

 

Thanks........

 

As a workaround could you just use '*'?

Or use the default and see what it does, you should be able to find it in the panther or sysprep directories afterwards.
 

My understanding is that using '*' will generate a random name, where i want to have DS use the existing name if the machine was previously registered or generate a VALID name if it wasn't.

Please correct me if my understanding of this is incorrect (honestly, I've not tried using '*' because of that preconception).

I have to make this a brain dead as possible for my users......  :)

Personally, I see this as a bug. DS knows the target environment and sysprep does NOT like names longer than 15 chars.

Yep - had this problem also. No way around it as far as I can see unless Symantec fix it, so I agree - its a bug.

 

Had the same issue, they advised me to update to the latest (hot fix 3 I think) and now it works fine. It just makes the comp name shorter after.

We used to have this issue with DS6.9 and resolved it by using SQL to create our own compname token limited to 15 characters (and remove spaces as they are illiegal!)

In DS6.9 this is achieved in the XML as follows,

%#*"select left(replace(name,' ',''),15) from computer where computer_id=%ID%"%</ComputerName>

Apparently this can also be done in the 7.x world. Take a look at these,

HOWTO10837 DS7, NS7, TS7 - How can I create or edit tokens?

HOWTO99979 Creating or modifying tokens in Deployment Solution

Kind Regards,
Ian./
 

 

Do you need anymore help on this one Jim?