ATI Driver Issue

trenkert · 08-13-2008, 02:12 PM

Hello, I am a relatively new Altiris admin, and we have CMS II installed in our environment. Overnight, we have approximately 50 machines, Dell Optiplex 745s and Optiplex GX620s, that have reverted to super low resolution and grainy color. After noticing that the driver would not apply any changes, I reinstalled the driver, reconfigured everything and was successful. The computer reverted on its own overnight, and now it is happening to several other machines (all with ATI video). As we use very few network management tools that 'touch' every computer like Altiris does... Altiris got blamed first by virtually our entire department. I find this hard to believe, and would like to find some proof or disproof about Altiris as the cause, but I'm not sure where to look. As far as I know, the only scheduled rollouts we have are agents or agent policies.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

jenifer.arnold · 08-13-2008, 02:27 PM

Did you load the MS patches last night? Make any sort of configuration changes yesterday?

trenkert · 08-13-2008, 03:13 PM

Only configuration changes made yesterday were to Carbon Copy rollout to try and fix approximately 1/3 of our machines which aren't automatically receiving this policy. We actually use WSUS for patch instead of Altiris, and I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that WSUS will leave notification that a patch has been applied in the event viewer, but I didn't see anything.

Nick · 08-13-2008, 03:36 PM

I have never heard of a CC Agent install causing a resolution change but I have heard of remote controlling into a system causing the resolution to change in rare instances.

I would suggest that you remove the CC agent from one of the systems, reset the resolution to normal and see if it changes. If it doesn't reinstall the CC Agent on the system again and see if the resolution goes bad again. If it does that will be pretty definitive that the problem is related to the CC Agent and then you can use that information to open a support incident with Symantec/Altiris.

Ok, I did a bit of searching on the Altiris KB system and it had some interesting information. Supposedly when you install the CC Agent it hooks into the video drivers so that CC can work in synchronized mode. There have been reports of this causing systems to reboot or BSOD when booting into them. So I would say that your video issue "may" be a result from the CC Agent install. I would still do the testing I indicated above or you can do a search in the Altiris KB using the criteria I did "carbon copy video resolution" then take a look at some of those articles for ideas.

jharings · 08-13-2008, 03:57 PM

The reboot was usually limited to some specific integrated Intel chipsets.

I can say from experience, that whatever benefit you think you will get from synchronized mode, don't do it, it's not worth it.

trenkert · 08-13-2008, 04:00 PM

Thanks Nick, it appears the culprit was synchronous video mode. I'm not sure if I made the change myself, or if someone else had; however, after resetting the resolutions, disabling synchronous video mode, and sending a task to all live collections to update their agent configs, the issue appears to have subsided. Now I'm wondering why nobody has referenced this issue in the past with any Dell 'standard configuration' ATI Video Cards as most shops with Altiris seem to use their hardware...

Nick · 08-13-2008, 04:33 PM

Glad to hear you got the problem tracked down. I will also agree with Jim that I tend to stay away from synchronized mode but more due to what I've heard rather than personal experience.

On the issue of Altiris getting blamed for everything, don't sweat that. That has been happening to me every since I started using the Altiris product however long ago that was... and no I won't admit it has been that long!!

andykn · 08-14-2008, 05:31 AM

Blame the Anti-Virus instead.