drummindog

I need a little help here to understand why the Aclient wants to disconnect and reboot immediately after reimaging a server with my DS6.9 SP2.

What I see on my (other server) DS6.8 SP2 server is that the Aclient will disconnect but then quickly reconnect. and run a token replace job as well as a file copy. This is crucial as we are building servers as automated as possible. This injects the files needed for the Server 2003 automated or silent setup, where it just goes ahead and configures the OS once the file copy and token replace job finishes and the server restarts.

So anyone know what I need to do to fix the Aclient behavior to reconnect or stay connected after a reimage job?

Thank you in advance!!

gwilmington

Does your image have the newest version of the Aclient on it? I'm wondering if the DS is auto-upgrading your agent to the latest version if your image contains an older version.

Derek Reedman

We do not have the DS agents on the machine when making the images. We have had weird issues before. Once it is imaged, I then push the agent to the machine and then configure it. This also makes sure that you have good communication with the device and can reinstall agents if you needed to.

drummindog

Rather than tell me how you do imaging, I really would appreciate some information on some AClient settings that would help me keep that client connected or at least reconnect very quickly.

Derek Reedman

The moral of the story sir, push the client after you image your machine.
Are the version of the client the same on the image or do you have it being upgraded?

drummindog

It should be using the latest version of AClient.

Derek Reedman

Do you use the client logs? Anything in there if it is on?

drummindog

Great!! Go ahead and explain how you get the Aclient to repush automatically right after the image process finishes.

Nick

I would have a vbscript contained within the image that would run from the runonce registry entry.

This vbscript would allow me to define custom inp files for a multiple DS environment. ie... different aclient settings based on the ip subnet range a given system was on.

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Scire potentia est (knowledge is power)

drumgod1

We do sort of the same thing with our workstations in imaging. We have 5 deployment servers and after the image goes down, there are a couple of FIRM copy scripts that copy the AClient installer (with a custom INP file to point to the correct DS) and the drivers, plus a Sysprep Token Exchange. In the sysprep file, we have a run once command to boot the computer with an automated admin login, run the AClient install files, then reboot. It just takes a couple of seconds and ensures that the correct AClient gets on the computer. We don't include it in our image.

Mike

drummindog

I think my question at this point is:
Do we know why the Aclient would just up and disconnect once the imaging task is done and if so, do we know a way to get it to reconnect quickly enough that a reboot would not happen. I have a sense that this is a config problem within the DS or Aclient.

Drumgod1, good to see another drummer here.

drumgod1

Drummers unite!

Brandon

When you do your replacetokens do you also delete the aclient.cfg file? That may help.

The other reason would be if you are switching between automation types, like DOS to replacetokens then WinPE to rdeploy the image down.

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Brandon

drummindog

Thank you. I will try to see if I can figure out what it is doing or how it is set. Altiris seems to be a beast that requires extensive training...which I do not have.