Installing client correctly

[Guest_imported]

Okay, I'm completely stumped now and I need some help. I'm having trouble getting my clients installed correctly. I plan on maintaining a network of 2000 and 98 machines but I'm just working on getting the 2000's to work correctly.

I'm using the NT remote client installation. For the boundry I have 10.10.0.0 defined. All of my clients are 10.10.10.x. I do a fresh install of 2000 professional on a machine, after a short while the client will be installed and shows up in the control panel. However the site will not show up on the site tab and of course the components are not installed.

I'm running SMS server SP3 on a Windows 2000 server sp2 machine. The machines are all windows 2000 professional sp2. I have 55 machines that are connected to the site correctly but any new ones will install the client, but not the site. If I take a machine that is working correctly and uninstall the client, it will reinstall it, but won't connect to the site.

Also, if I try to do a manual install before it installs the client it gives me a 'There is a problem with this installation..." error, and if I try it afterwards, the copy progress meter gets to half way then the setup program freezes.

Thanks for any suggestions.

 

[Jpoandl]

It looks like your boundary is set up wrong. You client subnet is 10.10.10.x (I'm assuming 255.255.255.0 subnet mask)

Yet, you defined 10.10.0.0 as your subnet in SMS. You need to change this to 10.10.10.0

Your client probably show ASSIGNED = NO in the SMS collections.

More Info:

Many people have problem setting up the SITE BOUNDARIES. You have to consider that the SUBNETs that define your site, will always use the client SUBNET MASK. Here's an example:

Say your everyone subnet starts with 10.x.x.x You might think that this is a class A address scheme. However, all clients are configured with a 255.255.0.0 subnet mask. Therefore, if you were to put 10.0.0.0 in your site boundaries, you would only pick up the client in the 10.0.x.x subnet...eventhough you have clients in the 10.1.0.0, 10.2.0.0, 10.3.0.0, 10.4.0.0...etc. Unfortunately, in the scenerio, you will have place all of your subnets into your SITE BOUNDARIES (10.0.0.0, 10.1.0.0, 10.2.0.0, 10.3.0.0, 10.4.0.0...etc)

Check your boundaries...this is the most common mistake. Also, check you schedule for network discovery...make sure that it has already tried to run. If not, schedule network discovery to run for a few hours...

Your clients should start appearing under COLLECTIONS...
Joseph L. Poandl
MCSE 2000

If your company is in need of experts to examine technical problems/solutions, please check out

http://www.esavio.com

 

[Guest_imported]

Thanks for the fast response.

Actually, our subnet mask is 255.255.0.0. That's why I had it set to 10.10.0.0. I assume that's correct f I understood your boundry explanation(saw it in someone elses thread).

I don't see that 'Assigned=' statement. I assume you're looking at the administrator under the collection tab to the 'All systems' collection. I wasn't able to find anything referring to the pc under that.

 

[Jpoandl]

(everyone has boundary problems...so its my canned response..)

OK...forget bounaries...if you have clients that are already installed, you probably have your boundaries setup.

Yes, "I don't see that 'Assigned=' statement. I assume you're looking at the SMS administrator under the collection tab to the 'All systems' collection. I wasn't able to find anything referring to the pc under that."..this is what I was talking about. This should show the clients, the site they belong to (in your case this should always be the same for every client), client install status, and ASSIGNED. Assigned means that the client exists within the Site Boundaries.

I usually perform NETWORK Discovery to "find" all client machines. You can set this up in Site Settings. It basically does a Ping at at scheduled period of time.

Anyway, for your problem, the first step should be to look at the SMS logs. Do you see any problems here? This would tell you if your SMS site is having a problem. Assuming that the SMS logs on the site server looks OK, investigate the clients...

go to C:\windows or WinNT\MS\SMS\LOGS directory. Take a look at the CCIM32, CliCore, CLiSVC, and SMSlci logs... at first perform a search for ERROR..then just read the logs Joseph L. Poandl
MCSE 2000

If your company is in need of experts to examine technical problems/solutions, please check out

http://www.esavio.com

 

[Guest_imported]

Joseph,

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'd have posted more questions (heh heh) sooner but a problem had developed on the server and it was a couple days before I could reboot it. Anyway, serveral more stations started working correctly after I fixed it(sms_executive was hung), but I still had a lot of machines 2000 and win98 installing the generic client, but not connecting to the sites.

I just figured out the problem. It was a permissions problem in the registry. One of the logs reported that it couldn't write a registry key. After comparing it's registy and mine I found there was a tree (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\SMS\Client\Sites\Shared\<site name>\Configuration) that didn't have ANY permissions whatsoever. Somehow the &quot;propagate parents permissions&quot; tag was turned off. Resetting the permissions allowed the client to install itself and everything is working now.

The 95 machines(at least my test machine) was a lot trickier. I had to eliminate a ghost site and modify the configurations files on the server so that 95 machines would add my site as a site! whew!

Thanks for the help, checking those log files helped point me in the right directions.

Thanks again.

 

[Jpoandl]

I'm glad it worked out for you... MS did a great job with the level of SMS logging both on the server and client side.

-talk to you later.. Joseph L. Poandl
MCSE 2000

If your company is in need of experts to examine technical problems/solutions, please check out

http://www.esavio.com