Building Dell Venue 11 Pro to CC4

[danwallis331]

Good Morning,

We have recently purchased some new "Dell venue 11 pro" tablets and have been trying to build one of them to the network but with no success. They are running Windows 8.1, the usb-ethernet adapter is working perfectly, I have disabled UAC and installed all updates. PXE booting is no option as you cant PXE boot from usb-ethernet adapter. So I decided to Smartclient them. We also have Windows surfaces that I smart cliented earlier in the year with no problems. When I try to Smart client, after entering all details a message appears that says:

 

Error Smart Client failed please rectify issue and re run Smart Client Process:

 

Error adding computer to domain: the request is not supported.

 

 

Any help would be great.

 

PS. If you have an answer that doesn't involve bootable disks that would be great.

 

Cheers,

[Norphy]

PXE booting is no option as you cant PXE boot from usb-ethernet adapter.

 

I don't know much about deploying using CC4 any more but I do know the above statement is incorrect. You can PXE boot from a USB Ethernet controller with the Dell Venue pro 11. The only problem is that it's disabled by default. To turn it on, you need to got into the tablets bios and enable the UEFI network stack. As long as the Ethernet adapter you've got is a good one, it will search for a PXE server and bit from it when it finds one.

 

However, if you're using a WDS server as your boot server, it needs to be running on Server 2012 or newer. Older versions don't Support booting machines running UEFI firmware.

[RobFrain]

Did you have any luck with this? We're looking at possibly buying these and I want them to run on CC4

[danwallis331]

No luck so far, we have got them a few stages further. If you do decide to buy them you will need a few items:

a multi usb adapter, an external cd rom drive and a usb - ethernet adapter. I have found that you can only build them by cd rom.

 

The tablets are great but they are quite tricky to build to the network. However when you figure that first build out all will become infinitely easier.