Our imaging jobs consist of reboot to pxe, deploy image, reboot to production, several deploy software quick delivery tasks, then an add to domain task.
Ever since adopting 7.1, we've had issues where post image the software delivery tasks randomly fail. It seems the problem goes away in scale for us, but then randomly comes back. I had always guessed it was a version/upgrade bringing back the problem or server bog down, but this time we have tracked down the issue to be post image the windows time is an hour off (not sure if this was issue all along, but maybe). If you go in date/time prefs on the client post image, it is set to correct date, correct time zone and adjust for daylight savings is checked.
During those post image software delivery tasks, the windows time service goes out and checks for correct time, realizes it's wrong and corrects it. If the machine is mid Symantec software install task, this hour adjustment causes the task to fail & fails the imaging job. Now I'm thinking the reason we've had this issue all along going away and coming back is maybe daylight savings time - depending on when I built the latest base image maybe certain time of years this hour jump is an issue and maybe other times it's not.
I was thinking the easy answer would be go to each task in my imaging job and change the timeouts to be > 60 mins. They are already set, however, to 300 minutes, so either I don't understand that setting (advanced, task option), or it's not honoring the timeout at the client level. The imaging job timeout itself is 90 minutes.
We adopted having the deploy software tasks as part of our imaging job because we have NAC software that is required to be installed post image but MUST be installed before a machine is turned over to the user, or they will have network issues. For this reason, I can't rely on managed software policies and my techs being unsure when software gets installed. When the machines reboot from the domain task and they are sitting at CTRL ALT DEL screen, the techs know the machine is good to go.
I don't really want to uncheck the box to fail job if task fails, because we want jobs to fail if something else is going on besides this time issue.
Maybe most Symantec customers don't install software as part of imaging jobs, otherwise I'm surprised more people aren't seeing this. I was thinking about a task that the first thing it does is fix date/time somehow, but that might have same timeout issue anyway. Then we were considering using setupcomplete.cmd to script something possibly.
Anyone have any ideas for solutions I'm not thinking of, or anyone ran into this already? Thanks!