Deployment Solution

Hi,

I'm getting some intermitent problems when I'm deploying automation jobs to test PC's - for some reason the first time the imaging job performs correctly, however if I reschedule the same imaging job to the same machine subsequent times the machine will not boot into automation despite going into a reboot loop (when the DAgent within the OS connects it can see there is a pending job and reboots the PC ) then eventually an error will be displayed in the job 'Unable to boot to automation' .

The DAgent will correctly shutdown the PC and reboot, the pc is set to boot from network first and PXE is working correctly otherwise as I get F8 prompt rather than an automatic boot into automation.

So the problem is in that the PXE bootloader is not detecting there is a pending job for the machine.

I'm using Serial Number and MAC Address lookup keys.  The test clients I'm using are Dell E6400 and E6500 laptops (this doesn't seem to be a problem in VMware VM's as far as I can see - I haven't done enough testing to confirm this is hardware related)

Any ideas on how to resolve this issue?

It appears that restarting the PXE Server service provides a workaround but it's clearly not a resolution.

Not sure about the restarting PXE services fixing problem cause if it boots to F8 then PXe is working.

I had the same error Unable to boot to Automation, but it was all the time. Suspected Winpe was corrupted but going to Pxe configuration menu and trying to delete Winpe, the Delete or remove was grayed out. Had to call tech support. They rebuilt my whole DS install which removed the winpe and had to reinstall it. Then everything worked.

Note here, I was told later when i asked that you can't remove winpe as long as you have one job made that has Winpe as the automation choosen. I think all I would have been able to do was delete all my winpe jobs then I could have deleted winpe and reinstalled.

thanks for the reply,

Yep the PXE configuration (network config) definately isn't the issue here,  it's the Altiris PXE Server service that's the problem - it seems to be able to either think the PC does not have an automation job assigned - or thinks it does, so once the service is 'non-functional' clients will either PXE boot all the time OR not at all.

...until the service is restarted, at which time everything works normally again!

It's pretty normal for the ds6.x pxe service to require a restart periodically but I'm needing to restart the service 2-3 times per day at the moment.

hoping this won't be the case in v7.1 (haven't played with it enough yet to know..)

It sounds like connectivity problems between the PXE Manager and the PXE Server.  Do you have any firewalls or devices between your PXE Manager installation and the PXE service?  If something is terminating the open connection between the two then this might explain the behaviour.

Heres a few things that might help you figure out issues with connectivity:

• Check the Status page in the PXE Configuration to verify the PXE server is connected
• Use "Netstat -an" on both the PXE server and PXE manager to check the connection state
• Turn on logging for the PXE server.  Look in the logs for the mac address of the client you are trying to rebuild - if an update does not come through on the second time you apply the rebuild job (and before the clients have rebooted) then the PXE Server won't know to boot your client into WinPE
• Remove as many other network devices as possible between the the PXE Manager and Server
• Disable any firewall on the PXE server (just for testing of course!)

Hope that helps.

My PXE server service was giving me a lot of issues and making me reboot several times a day I rebuilt my DS 6.9 sp4 and the problems have been resolved. Just make a good backup of your database and rebuild

I found the latest batch of E6400 with the A20 rev bios gave me the PXE problems. I downgraded to A19 and that worked.

I recently upgraded DS to 6.9 build 453 sp4. I am trying to create an image on a Windows7 HPcomputer (8000 elite) and I keep getting the above error. It will not go into automation. Aclient is installed and configured correctly and I can remote into this machine via the Altiris server. Any ideas?????
Thanks in advance

I'm having a similar problem here.  I don't get the Unable to boot to automation error, but sometimes clients on a build will boot to linux automation, and sometimes not.  A consistency seems to be a freshly imported computer will NOT boot to automation, but once it has been build fully, it will.  But again, that is intermittent.

Env details:

DS:
Windows Server 2008 R2 on an ESXi VM
SQL 2008 SP1
DS 6.9 SP4 w/ HIIS from Altrinsic Solutions
SEP 11 Update 5

When the environment was first build, everything was working perfectly.  I then installed SEP (long story on why SEP install got delayed), and my problems began.  Uninstalling SEP didn't help, and I haven't contacted Symantec yet for the proper "clean" tool.  To add insult to injury, the server admin who installed SEP for me didn't take a VM snapshot before he did so, so there was no rolling back to prove it was SEP.

I also have an odd situation where if the PXE Manager service is stopped or stops, when it is restarted, the shared config vanishes (default name for it is "Linux Managed", but even if I change the name, it still vanishes).

Anyone else experiencing the same?

Regards,

CJ