Deploy jobs fail after copying from another job

We had a frustrating experience this week, and I thought I would share it in case anyone else is searching for the same solution. We were trying to send an image down to a computer, but it kept hanging after it displayed the message “client record updated.” We were so confused, because we could queue up two different imaging jobs to the same computer. The first deployment job would hang, so we would delete it from the console and a second deployment job would immediately start running.

Since we did get some deploy jobs to run, but not other ones, that seemed to indicate that the problem was with the job itself rather than with the network communication. We were trying to push two different images from the same share, and with the same permissions. That seemed to rule out a network permissions error.

We narrowed down the problem to one or two possibilities after some consultation with Altiris support and with some others here at my university. The jobs that were working had been created on DS 6.9 SP1. The jobs that were failing were copies of those jobs created after we upgraded to DS 6.9 SP2. We were copying the jobs because they contained a whole bunch of conditions for different hardware types that we wanted to maintain. It looks like either you can't copy those jobs and maintain settings that work, or else you can't bring those jobs that were created in SP1 over to SP2.

So in the end, the solution was that we needed to re-create the deployment jobs. That was a bummer since that also meant re-creating several conditions, but at least it works. I hope they can fix the bug that lies at the root of this, whether it is in copy/pasting deployment jobs or whether it is using jobs created in SP1 after upgrading to SP2.