Deployment Solution 8.5 RU3 Lessions learned

Since the release of ITMS 8.5 RU3 we´ve upgraded a few environments.

Over all, the upgrade success rate is very high and it seems to be a stable release so far. In this Blogpost I want to show which issues we found so far and the solutions for the issues.

After upgrading from 8.5 RUx to 8.5 RU3 a few issues „popped-up“ but with the help from Symantec / Broadcom Supportteam we where able to fix the issues.

We discovered an issue where we are unable to run DS Jobs on predefined computers. Running the OS Deployment Job on an existing computer (not predefined) worked perfectly. You may end up in WinPE with the following warning: *WARN Policy request: Failed to download or process client policies, retrying in a minute, error: Element not found (0x80070490)

If „Initial Settings“ are disabled in the Targeted Agent settings you will see this error message

Enable Initial Settings in Targeted Agent Settings on the SMP Server

Solution: To prevent this issue just enable Initial Settings in the Targeted Agent settings. Usually this is enabled by default, but I´ve found some environments where it is disabled. It would be good if a note was added to the release notes that this needs to be checked after the upgrade….

2. When resetting the Bios to Factory Default be aware that this issue might occur. This isn´t a product issue. Nevertheless, make sure to set the correct date / time before trying to deploy the OS (in WinPE).

*WARN Server Connection: Failed to connect to NS server, retrying in a minute, error: A required certificate is not within its validity period when verifying againt the current system clock or the timestamp in the signed file

Solution: Set the correct date / time in the Bios of the affected computer.

3. After installing 8.5 RU3 and running the OS Deployment Job on Clients, the Symantec Management Agent is unable to register on the SMP Server. This only occurs when persistant connection is enabled and the computer is joined to a domain. This error is reproducible if the above conditions are true. Otherwise you may not see this issue. Many thanks to the Symantec / Broadcom Supportteam who helped me to nail down the issue and luckily they also provide a fix for the issue. Currently we are testing the fix and it seems to fix the problem. In the meantime Symantec released a Pointfix for the issue.