WDS grrrrr

[gshaw]

Odd problem this is but very irritating as it's affecting our imaging at the moment

We use SMS OSD pack to re-image computers (cheap under Campus License and works pretty well up until now!), as you may or may not know it makes OS install CDs you boot up from then grab the image off the SMS server.

We then put the contents of these CDs onto RIS to allow network boot, which worked fine. We updated to SP2 and of course WDS comes with it. Since then (or so it seems) we can now only image one PC at a time otherwise we get BSODs, imaging stopping 1/2 way through etc.

As part of the troubleshooting I had 2 machines trying to image side by side and used the CD media rather than network boot. Voila it worked fine! So it seems that when one client loads up the image over the network it kicks the other one out

Has anyone who used to use RIS had any trouble with WDS in legacy mode?

Gonna have a right moan at Microsoft here as imo the WDS was badly thought out and overlaps various other products they're making as well... SCCM, Microsoft Deployment... all doing vaguely the same thing but barely any are compatible with each other

SMS 2003 makes WIM images, but different to what WDS can boot; I need WinPE 1.5 but you there's no download link for it only 2.0 that isn't compatible with older stuff Too many programs not enough time spent thinking things through imo... kinda sums up Microsoft for me atm (think Office 2007 and GPO, Exchange 2007 and ADUC)

[ArchersIT]

Odd problem this is but very irritating as it's affecting our imaging at the moment

We use exactly the same setup - and yes it is a huge frustration that SMS, WDS, BDM and all the other versions of building software are all slightly different and incompatable.

Having said that, we have not had any problems with building machines from the server since upgrading to SP2 (once we had worked out how to turn WDS into legacy mode!). Of course most of the bulk re-builds are done through SMS and most of the bulk builds will happen over the summer, but we have been building 3 or 4 at once with no problems.

It may be worth making contact via PM and we can compare notes a bit easier.

Jonathan

[gshaw]

After speaking with Jonathan I confirmed my suspicions that WDS was at fault, turns out there's some bug \ "feature" when running in mixed mode that was messing up the legacy RIS features.

Didn't realise that by running the deployment services MMC it seems to put the feature set back onto mixed mode. So solution that seems to be working so far was...

Drop WDS back down to legacy...

wdsutil /uninitialize-server

Then check the mode with

wdsutil /get-server /show:config

Should now show up as Legacy mode. At that point then only run the Windows Deployment Services Legacy shortcut to set up the basic RIS flat XP image and start the legacy service. After that all seems back to normal and I managed to get 2 machines imaging at once for the first time in ages

Also seems binlsvc no longer controls the RIS \ WDS Legacy anymore, the service I now have running is

Windows Deployment Services (WDSSERVER)

Which is odd as BINLSVC works in legacy mode Maybe that proves the problem, a different service running for legacy with mixed mode compared to legacy in Legacy only mode... more Microsoft madness