PC will not appear in my SCCM OS deployment collection
Here’s one we were having problems with a couple of months ago:
My colleague after registering two PC’s in “Operating System Deployment – Computer Association” and making them members of our “OS Pre-Staged Computers for Deployment” collection found there was absolutely no trace of either PC in the “OS Pre-Staged Computers for Deployment” collection when it came time to assign these PC’s to their required OU and role in order to kick off deployment.
It was a very odd situation as the PC’s had been purged from SCCM and AD before being re-registered for a bare-metal build scenario.
After going back and registering the PC tags and corresponding MAC details in “Computer Association” I couldn’t find any trace of either PC in the OS Deployment collection even after “Updating Collection Membership” and refreshing the collection. Note re-registering PC details if it doesn’t register in your OS Deployment collection the first time probably isn’t that great an idea (duplicate entries in your SCCM database records) – but I was running out of options at that stage myself.
A double-check of the PC tag and the MAC address the PC was returning from a paused F12 PXE boot confirmed he used the correct details for the machines in question and I knew the PC’s had been removed from AD and SCCM but just for a hoot I double checked and found nothing. The PC’s could boot into F12 fine and pick up a valid IP address so this had me stumped.
After spending quite a bit of time trying to figure out why the PC tag was not registering in SCCM – I decided to perform an nslookup of the PC tag we were trying to associate in SCCM. It was at that point I noticed the IP address returned by nslookup was different to the ones assigned by PXE/DHCP boot for both PC’s, my conclusion was that DNS had not been doing it’s job properly purging old DNS registrations.
I asked our Security team to purge any old records of DNS registrations that matched the ones we were trying to build and about an hour later after re-registering the PC’s in the Computer Association node they finally appeared in our OS deployment collection and I was able to assign the PC to the correct OU and role.