It feels like my freshman years in the IT business, where there is no fear, not a single worry. Beer and pizza will be there later, and all things will work it's self out.

Well I am lost for words on this product deployment so far. Lots of bells and whistles to see in the Altiris 7.5 SMP, tons of automated actions that you don't have to script to do. Something you can train even beginner IT forayers to use in the console when it comes to software management, Patch and Inventory.

Until you get to the DS, we suddenly have lost our ability to image machines. As in issues on both Notification servers, separate issues, different errors. But bottom line is simply we cant reliably deploy any images.

The issues seems to relate to either timing, or design. The NSE's are supposed to get processed with priorities, and since inventory is one of the least important it becomes at the back of the line. So we went to Initial Deploy as a method for sending a highly...

Sorted a lot of items today, most discovery and not fixes.

Discovery of a lot more issues that is. All DS and imaging related. Here are some of the crazy scenarios.

1. Build a machine with the predefined spread sheet, and the machine did not join the domain. After a manual joining to the domain, the machine enters WinPE every time. In the console there is now 2 instances of it, one with IP and domain info. The other which is just blank.

2. Any machines that needs an image job on our second NS, Jobs gets the error of either "Not Capable", or "Unexpected error while saving this schedule"

3. Image is a crap shoot at this point, there is no telling which service, directory, files to clean up. Like voodoo.

But found 1 cool trick out, you can resize the pesky window sizes if you grab it at the top of the sizing bar(Red dot).

And interesting PXE bounce when the PXE configuration fails to replicate settings from the parent....

Great call today, Altiris support is like a box of chocolate, unless you are nice to some people and they can get you connected with the right people.

Chatted for a while with Thomas Baird today, he's brilliant like Brent Bishop. 2 of the smartest Altiris guys I've ever had a chance to working with. So on with the items of the day. 

We narrowed our top production issues to 3 main items, with a bunch of sub-issues that I sent to Symantec in an email hoping to have the DS team address with some efficiency. 

Issue 1. Machines gets a Device not capable at times. So the issues stems from inventory more than SBS as we originally thought. The NSE processing as Inventory vs Initial Deploy. So Changes were made to initial deploy and testing continues I will say now image to existing machines do work(See issues 3 for more details) but new machines remains to be tested. So the beta solution is fake a InitialDeployment task and get the NSE...

Fixed a few things yesterday if you are keeping up with this still. The PXE/WinPE loading issue is working for now. but our cases with Symantec is stacking up.

There are 5 open cases which all seemed to be shuffled around from technician to technicians. When I get time I will be calling the duty manager to escalate them to the DS team as they are almost all DS related.

So the new issues:

Some machines does not always boot in to WinPE. They just wont do it even with a SBS rebuild and only on some jobs. Unfortunately this happened to one of my image machines. It imaged fine on Child Server 1's Site server 1. But will not boot in to PXE on Child server 2's Site server 2.

When an image is captured. Which means we had to force the machine to shutdown after the Syprep. They delete the image capture job and apply a Image capture task. Well now the Image Deploy job will not allow us to populate the Serial # after selecting the image. Look at the red...