I was having challenge were Windows Xp embedded system was getting imaged through DS 6.9, pen drive.. etc And my engineers are keeping Altiris 7.1 agent inside it. This has started making issue as same GUID was taken by all system.Altiris 7.1 is not yet implemented fully hence engineer from different location are using their local DS or other methods to capture and deploy image … to overcome from this I have found this way … And It Works …
Below steps need to be followed without fail and Point No 7 is a key
"C:\Program Files\Altiris\Altiris Agent\AeXAgentUtil.exe" /resetguid
rjones - in his very first sentence, he says he's imaging w/ ds 6.9.
My shop images everything w/ 6.9, and probably plenty of other shops who, like me, tried DS 7.1 and found it lacking in many different ways and decided to keep ds 6.9 for imaging/deploying computers. To me, and probably plenty of other people, DS 7.1 is a mess. i don't want to use symantec's "prepare for image capture" because it's way too oversimplified for the processes i want to run during winpe, post-PE, and so on. i'm glad symantec hasn't EOL'd 6.9 yet because 7.1 still isn't ready to replace 6.9. We love itms 7.1's patch management, inventory, software delivery, etc, but DS 7.1 just isn't where we need it to be, so we have both agents on every machine - Dagent 6.9 and smp 7.1.
Mohammad - upgrading SMP is not something that happens all the time. If you are keeping with good practices, you update your image more often than you update SMP itself. On top of that, it's a simple matter to turn on the policy in SMP to automatically upgrade agents. This way, PCs imaged during the time between upgrading the SMP and updating the image aren't left in the lurch. As long as upgrading the SMP doesn't change the server's name and/or IP address (or screw up the database), this is not an issue.
as i said, i plan to implent this pretty soon myself. thanks for sharing your hard work, R.Prasanna!
It seems to me that you are making this a lot harder than it needs to be.
Since in Step 1 you are installing “Altiris 7.1 (which I’m assuming you mean Deployment Solution 7.1 - DS), then you should be taking advantage of the Symantec Management Console and the power of DS instead of trying to do everything manually.
From you description, you are really only trying to ensure that the deployed image does not have a duplicate GUID and that each deployed system has a unique host name and that it is joined to the correct domain. All of this can be accomplished automatically and remotely using the Symantec Management Console
Use these steps instead.
If you need to change the computer to a different domain than it belonged to before it was reimaged, or if you want to change the host name to something different, they you can insert a “Apply System Configuration” task to perform those steps and/or you can use a custom answer file (Sysprep Configuration file) in conjunction with the “Deploy Image” task.
Q. What will happen when you upgrade SMP to later version and you imaged a PC after that? Will you create an image everytime?
I personally don't put the agent in my image, simply after the image is deployed i copy from SMP\NSCAP\BIN the agent and all the plugin and then install them in order. That way no need to unregister agent (GUID) and/or delete a record from SMP and no worries if i upgraded SMP as the location and the plugin msi will never change.
hey that's pretty useful! we image using ds 6.9 even though we use ns7.1 for everything else, and i hate waiting hours and hours after a machine is built for the smp agent to install all its sub-agents, and the PCA agent always needs a reboot after it gets installed before it will work reliably. this sounds like it will solve that issue for us.
i'll have to try to incorporate this next time i update the image. i expect it will probably work the same in win7 as it does for you in xp, since i don't see anything xp-specific in your process.