Deployment Solution

Does anyone know an easier way of resetting a client in Altiris 7.1. I can boot into the WinPE environment fine and pick up initial deployment jobs fine. Then say I want to reboot the client computer and boot into WinPE again it doesn't allow me to. It just displays a message Exiting PXE ROM.

People have mentioned that if you delete the client from the console or from in Manage -> Resources, then try again this will work but it doesn't. What I need to do to get it working again is to open the Symantec Management Agent on the server, go to settings then run update, open task manager, look for the BootWiz32.exe and wait for it to finish running. Then boot up the client and try again it will work.

As you can imagine this is a very time consuming process and I need a quicker solution, does anyone have any ideas?

Typically, turn off the PC, delete from Manage > Computers, perform a Delta Resource Membership Update, and then restart PXE services.  Wait 15 minutes or so (coffee break/sandwich time), then try it again.  If you follow this process, are you able to re-use the system for testing?

A lot of people would like to manually control when/if F8 appears, so they can "manually" control a boot into WinPE.

Hmmm...  Well, sorta...  Not really.  Here's the skinny on that for all of you tech geeks out there.

1) In DS 6.9, you had a way to control how long the F8 menu would appear.  That feature is currently NOT available in DS 7.1.  Period.  End of discussion, so don't ask for a tweak or work-around, 'cause it's not there.  Now that that's settled, what CAN you do?

2) The PXE Server Service has a table it maintains in RAM of each computer and what to do with it.  For Unknown computers (eg initial deployment), it has a setting telling it what to do with them - which is to boot to automation.  For all others, it has 3 possible settings: Unknown (initial setting, defaulting to production after a 3 second delay), Production immediately, or automation immediately.  The first setting is what you start with, until it is changed to production or automation by a job.  There is no way to set it back to unknown.  Well, other than restarting the service.  Once a job has set it to production, or automation, it stays that way until set by a job to the other.  There's no reset job.  Period.

Soooo, there are basically two things people want to do.  One is to re-test initial deployment on a computer.  To do that, you have to do what is outlined above and you heard before, because it has to actually BE a new computer to ACT like a new computer.

The other though is simply that someone may WANT to boot back into automation manually.  bzzzz - can't do that, not without restarting the PXE server service.  As mentioned above, that is NOT an option in this version right now.

The BEST way therefore to get back into WinPE, unless you want initial deployment to fire, is simply to assign a job to boot to automation.  That will send a notice to the PXE server that you are planning on doing so, and the table will be switched from production to automation.

Not toooo bad, eh?