Offline Deployment "Tweaks"?
Greetings,
I'm relatively new to the KACE SDA, so I'm still on the early stages of the learning curve. Bear with me.
I am using Version 9.0.144
I have been able to create a system image that works great when the target computer is booted via IPv4 PXE boot. When I build the offline deployment using that same image, it has some areas where it will fail.
- The system image has a pre-deployment task of "[NAME] Get Computer Name x64 [DIALOG]" which fails.
- The command line in the task is: getcomputername_x64.exe /dialog /log
- It does allow me to skip the task and continue with the deployment
- I also have the mid-level task of "[NAME] Set Computer Name x64 [AUTO]" Which also fails.
- The command line in the task is: setcomputername_x64.exe /log
- This also allows me to skip the task.
- The next oddity is when the progress gets to the step "SDA Breadcrumb File", it will fail unless the target computer is plugged into the network.
- Not really ideal if I send an end user a thumb drive to reimage their computer at home.
- The last puzzle is when the target device performs it's first reboot before going into the post install tasks, it reboots into the thumb drive KBE and want's to start the whole image process again.
- You can continue if you select "No" to the warning telling you that the process will erase the contents of the disk drive.
- The target computer reboots and then boots into the disk drive, and continues with the post install tasks.
My guess is that I have missed a step somewhere when creating the Offline Deployment, but I have not found anything yet. Even Google can't tell me... ;-)
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Answers (2)
1- You might want to check the USB's Tasks.xml file, it contains the list of all tasks, in order, and the command to be used by the Task Engine to launch them. Get computername should be somewhere around the top, post it's contents here.
2- Same as ^^
Also these naming tasks where updated in version 8.2, make sure you are using the built-in ones, not the ones customer's had to manually create and add in the past.
3- Breadcrumb pulls information from the SDA or RSA and stores imaging details in C:\ProgramData\Quest\KACE folder.
You could remove it from tasks XML, or rebuild the USB Image, with the Force Continue on errors checked.
4- This is at BIOS level, the Task Engine in KACE has no power at BIOS level (unless you are using tasks with tools such as CCTK DELL Command and Configure, to alter BIOS settings).
Ideally you would want to make sure the HDD is the first one in Boot Order settings, and make sure the one time boot to USB media is being used, rather than altering the boot order. When Windows is deployed, it will create a Boot option on top of HDD named "Windows Boot Manager"; so that the Windows setup becomes the first boot option.
Comments:
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Thank You Channeler!
Below is the text of the "GetComputerName" task in the tasks.xml
I've edited it to use the "D:\" drive as the path, but it doesn't work all of the time. Sometimes the USB is given a different drive letter.
I've been advised by our Quest trainer that I should contact Quest support on this as the offline deployments should not have this issue. Either way, I wanted to follow-up with you.
Thanks for your input.
<Task ID="49">
<Name>[NAME] Get Computer Name x64 [DIALOG]</Name>
<WorkingDirectory>%UFDPATH%\KACE\preinstall\49</WorkingDirectory>
<CommandLine><![CDATA["D:\KACE\preinstall\49\getcomputername_x64.exe" /dialog /log]]></CommandLine>
<Parameters></Parameters>
<ExpectedReturnCode>0</ExpectedReturnCode>
<PostTaskAction>None</PostTaskAction>
<KACETaskType>Naming Rule</KACETaskType>
<FileType>Exe</FileType>
<Type>PR</Type>
<Guid>162c6ebfb2717f</Guid>
</Task> - dsteinhauser 2 years ago-
use %UFDPATH% instead of D:\
Same as the previous line right there.
the wildcard %UFDPATH% should be able to pick whatever letter is assigned to the pendrive. - Channeler 2 years ago
Pertaining to #3, the script makes a call back to the server to get some information about the deployment in order to create the breadcrumb file. This will be fixed to get that information locally instead as an offline deployment has no connection back to the server.
