MDT Network Boot

[lmrogers]

Morning,

 

This is a bit of a strange one and may be a slight cross over between forums/topics.

 

I have an MDT server which works and deploys images but not to all our IT rooms. I have ip helpers on all the VLANs and this works as when I change the VLANs on a virtual machine it still picks up the image and runs through the deployment. I have also managed to get it to deploy to one of our IT rooms successfully. However, I have 2 IT rooms where the computers are not picking up the server/image to network boot and I am getting server time out errors.

 

I have checked everything I can think of, I have compared switch configurations and they all seem fine. I have confirmed the ip helper address on VLANs and they are fine. I feel like I am missing something really obvious but have run out of ideas.

 

Any help would be appreciated.

 

Cheers

[Jcx500]

is the switch tagged on the server vlan ?

[lmrogers]

is the switch tagged on the server vlan ?

 

So the switch uplink is tagged for the server vlan and can ping the MDT server happily. Also when I put in the Bootserver and a filename as DHCP options, it picks up the deployment server but has a problem running the task sequence or errors about the bootfile.

[Jcx500]

Maybe a Driver issue then, Do these Pc's have different Nic's to the ones that are working

[clareq]

Eliminate the switch - take a machine that can image to a room that can't, and vice versa.

[simpsonj]

Also, have you built anything recently? There was an update to MDT that ticked a box which screwed up my MDT setup

[lmrogers]

Looks like it is definitely a switching problem. Plug a computer that wasn't working into another room and it works. I just can't see any differences on the switches though

[IrritableTech]

If these machines won’t boot into MDT check any spanning tree settings on the switch. To ensure the machine can gain an IP and DHCP setting quickly, you may need to enable rapid spanning tree, or shut off spanning tree entirely on these switches temporarily.

[lmrogers]

If these machines won’t boot into MDT check any spanning tree settings on the switch. To ensure the machine can gain an IP and DHCP setting quickly, you may need to enable rapid spanning tree, or shut off spanning tree entirely on these switches temporarily.

 

So spanning tree is turned off on both the working switch and the non working switch.

[themightymrp]

Only just spotted this. I had a very similar issue this week - but not identical. I was able to get the boot to work just fine if I had the BIOS on the machines set to legacy/CSM mode, but if they were in UEFI mode then it wouldn't pull down the boot file. Does this sound possible in your situation? It was only affecting 2 IT suites, the rest of the school was bang on.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

To follow that, the solution for me was to disable NetBIOS over TCP/IP in the IPv4 settings of my MDT/WDS server. One tick box and that was it!