Make sure the password you are using is not more than 8 characters. DOS does not like to pass anything beyond that.

also make sure the account you are using does have rights to the express share.

Called Altiris support and this are the results:



After PXE is unable to connect to share, tried breaking out and manually mapping to a share on a different machine. This didn't work either. Tech support asserts this is due to a hot fix applied on the DC that probably added a GPO which prohibits DOS connections. No idea what this patch or GPO would be.



Since backing out the applied patches is out of the question, tech support suggested using WinPE rather than DOS.



It appears that PXE DOS connectivity is (or will soon be) obsolete.

Do you have another server with the drive space to store images and such?

A Domain Controller is not a good idea to install an Altiris type product.



Depending on how many clients you expect to have connect back you may be able to get by with a highend desktop or low-mid sized server.

The Deployment Server is not very resource intensive. All it needs is a good connection back to the switch and storage for all your app packages and images.





Clay



Also,

Regarding your PW issue. DOS pxe booting cannot use special characters in it's password (ie.. !,@,?, etc..) along with the 8 character limit mentioned above.

I am not using the DC as an Altiris server, but the DC sends GPOs down to all the servers in the domain, and my Altiris Deployment Server is one of them. This used to work a couple of weeks ago, but some patches were applied to all the servers in the domain and it appears one of the patches (according to Altiris tech support) introduced either a GPO or some other updated system file that now blocks DOS mode connections to shares.



The password/account I'm using is less than 8 characters and very simple. Also, like I said, it used to work. The only changes in the environment were Microsoft security patches.



I am now switching to WinPE and this appears to work, but slower and more overhead than DOS. Also, I have a number of very old (6+ years) Dell machines in the environment and I'm not sure yet how those will behave with WinPE.



My field techs were used to the DOS PXE menu, now they'll need to be retrained for the new "look" of WinPE.



Thanks Microsoft!



Best regards to all.

Do you want a possible fix for this?

I'm not sure that hotfix answer you got is really the correct answer, especially if they don't know the hotfix that would cause that. I'm think its still possibly a long password or incorrect permissions.

Anthony,

I had similiar problem and it was password issue and also my deployment was discconnected from Domain Controller for some reason. How I noticed this is the deployment server took forever to load group policy. I then looked inside the groups under local users and groups and the Administrators group and the domain admins account was lost with lots of characters meaning it had no user in the group.



I then started to experiment, because I have a test network setup with Domain Control and Deployment server. The DC has dhcp, wins and dns the standard setup for a Active Directory Domain Controler. The Deployment was setup simple with pxe server.



The initial install of everything went good. The Servers were 2003 all sp's and patches. When it was all up and running I started getting a PXE Serice failed, which I have been getting this same problem on live network with deployments. The quick fix on live network was in services telling the pxe manager to restart service.



On the test network I took out WINS and DNS and the error went away but pxe service says it isn't properly installed.



So I am looking for a fix the the PXE Service Failure.



Oh and I've been a member of this forum since 2001 but lost my password and login just so you know that I've been using the altiris product for quite a while.



Jacque