SCCM PXE - Works a few times then..........
I have been able to successfully boota testmachine via PXE and install an OS (using the Task Sequencer) but after building the same machine a dozen or sotimes SCCM stops supplying the machine with the boot WIM. This is a demo machine and I am using it to show customers SCCM's functionality (hence why i am constantly rebuilding). The PXE service point produces a status message stating "The SMS PXE Service Point intructed device to boot normally since it has no PXE advertisement assigned." The device exists in a collection which has a TS advertisement assigned The advertisement is configured to "make this TS available to WINPE and PXE" I have attemtped to re-run advertisement As a workaround I found I either have to delete the machine from the database , or create a new collection and new advertisment for the TS. The same advertisment works perfectly when run from "run advertised programs" Has anyone experienced anything similar? Any thoughts? Ross
October 31st, 2007 11:13am

Hi If you want to install a test machine again after running a pxe advertisments you have to clear last pxe advertisment. Go to the collection where you installed the machine update collection membership and then right click on the machine and click Clear Last PXE advertisment. then you should be able to install again.
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October 31st, 2007 11:40am

Hi, I don't know what your configuration and settings look like but I can imagine two things that can cause this behavior: 1. The PXE flag is set on the computer resource to indicate that the computer was booted mandatory via PXE and prevents any further PXE boots until it is cleared (right click on the computer in the collection and select "Clear Last PXE Advertisement") [should only happen if the Task Sequence is advertised mandatory] 2. A caching issue: Occurs when the ResourceID of a computerchanges but the MAC address stays the same. Happens if you delete andimport a computer with the same MAC address after it was booted via PXE, then SCCM/PXE tries to lookup the advertisements for the old ResourceID. You can restart the Service WDSSERVER to clear the cache of the SCCM/PXE provider and see if the problem persists. Are you using physical hardware or virtual machines? (If your are using virtual machines make sure that you have no installed firewall on your host, in my case a disabled firewall service was still active at a low level and caused some strange pxe boot errors) Regards, Sebastian
October 31st, 2007 12:20pm

Hi Sebastian Thanks for your response. Ihad alreadyrun ""Clear Last PXE Advertisement" on the collection and on the computer object but no difference, SCCM still thinks there is no advertisement advertised to the machine and as a result will not provide a WIM to boot into. One interesting note; when I right click a machine in SCCM and select "Clear Last PXE Advertisement" no advertisement appears in the window. But when I look at the properties on the collection the machine is a member of, I can see the advertisement. I reboot the machine regularily as they are a VM demo environment, so all machines are virtual. I have looked down the PXE caching path and found it has also made no difference(restarted the WDS service the PXE component and looked at the SMS PXE.log). I doubt it would be my firewall as i have created a virtual lan for my vm machines only . Regards, Ross
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November 2nd, 2007 3:46am

Hi Ross, are you using the MAC address or BIOS GUID to import the computer? (The BIOS GUID is troublesome because of the two existing formats (wire and dsiplay format) It would be interesting to run the SQL Profiler to see what SCCM is doing during the pxe boot sequence. You should lookout for the execution of two stored procedures: NBS_LookupDevice and NBS_GetPXEAction... Regrads, Sebastian
November 2nd, 2007 2:50pm

Hi Sebastian Thanks for the reply, I ran SQL profiler and looked for NBS Lookup device and found that the BIOS Guid was slightly different to my machines BIOS guid (First three sets of numbers were different). I used both the BIOS guid and MAC address to import the machine into SCCM. Not sure what steps I should use to remediate this for exisiting machines in the database. But moving forward I will only use the MAC address to rebuild the machine. Is this a known issue with SCCM? Ross
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November 7th, 2007 3:25am

I don't know of any issues with SCCM incorrectly modifying SMBOIS GUIDs. I don't even have a good speculation on how this might have happened.
November 7th, 2007 10:41pm

Thanks Michael Thats cool. It may be an issue with Vmware. When importing machines into SCCMdo you recommend only using theMAC address? Ross
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November 8th, 2007 1:32am

No. As far as the product team knows, using MAC addresses or SMBIOS GUIDs should be equally good unless there's a particular reason you know the SMBIOS GUID is "bad". Going back several years, there were times when computers sometimes came from manufacturers with the SMBIOS GUID set to all zeros or all ones.But I haven't heard about that happening recently. And ConfigMgr 2007 explicitly ignores SMBIOS GUID values of all zeros or all ones -- we treat those values as if they weren't set at all. I would agree that perhaps there could be a settings issue with VMware. When the computer is virtual and not "real", the virutalization software has to simulate the SMBIOS GUID, and I don't know how WMware does that, or if the customermight haveto play with some settings.
November 8th, 2007 3:39am

All my VM's have complete unique BIOS GUID's which makes me assume they are a literal GUID genereted at machine creation. However my physical Dell computers all have a BIOS GUID starting with either 4C4C4544 or 44454C4C. Simon
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November 8th, 2007 4:34am

I can attest that this is not isolated to VMWare machines. This has happened to me several times. I'm knee-deep in a new SCCM deployment and testing the "push" of Vista to four different models of IBM desktops and laptops. I have added and re-added the same MAC address several times and with three different machine I will run into this problem. After getting tired of searching, i just throw in a boot disk.
July 22nd, 2008 9:21pm

Hi, The PC receives a new GUID during deployment, and therefore, the original associated PC will become obsolete. The PC (obviously still with the same MAC and name) will be re quarried by SCCM and placed in a collection according to what ever discovery setup you are running. This is actually an good thing as we normally do not want our image TS to be advertised to the PC ones it has been re-imaged, unless we are in a test environment... What do we do to work around this! Fairly simple actually. We create a query in our collection that put's the test PC back in our Test collection. Ok if you do a search for "Michael Petersen's Deployment Stuf: Blog" and a doc called " Keep Test Computers in Test collection" Follow the script and then you can osd to the same pc as many times as you want ! If you can 't find it. I will try and send you the file. Jamos J
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July 24th, 2008 11:00am

Here is the URL for the above: http://kongkuba1.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!EEFF1607E296E5AB!185.entry Jamos J
July 24th, 2008 11:08am

Sebastian, Thanks for posting this. The point # 2 worked for me. I had a computer called PRESALES25 that I had to re-image and name FINANCE02. I think the only way of doing so is to just delete the client PRESALES25 from SCCM and import a new computer information with new name. But since MAC address on the new computer is the same, PXE manager instructs the device to boot normally assuming that there is no PXE advertisement assigned to it. Restarting the WDS service on SCCM server cleared the cache and the computer boots fine now. How can I avoid it the next time? There are few engineers who are involved in OSD but they dont have access to the server and I would really like to avoid doing this every time I reimort a computer with a different name. Thanks. Mayur
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April 6th, 2009 8:26pm

I was having this issue. Restarting WDS Server solved it. I created a batch file on my SCCM server to restart the service and it now seems be working. Thanks Sebastian! Jon
May 17th, 2011 5:54pm

ThisMayur
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May 17th, 2011 6:46pm

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