Kernel Confusion

Today’s task was to upgrade an existing SCCM R2 SP1 installation to service pack 2. I checked the site status before I started: everything was “green”. The prerequisite check was “ok”, despite two minor warnings. So I went on and all SP2 tasks finished successfully. Well then, I thought, let’s check the existing OS deployment tasks to see if it’s still working.

We set up a VM and tried booting into PXE… with no response of the server. Restarting the WDS service didn’t do the trick. So I dug a little deeper and took a look at the logs in %programfiles%\Microsoft Configuration Manager\Logs. Interesting files to look at: mpcontrol.log and pxecontrol.log (use SMS TRACE to

view these logs, if you don’t have any other preference). The PXE log didn’t tell me anything interesting, it even logged successful self-tests! Funny, because the log in the ConfigMgr-Console told me otherwise: the PXE service was not responding. It also told me the Management Port was giving a HTTP 500 error.

After a lot of rebooting and error-hunting I came up with a “solution” to this problem. It seemed the service pack installation didn’t properly update the PXE and management point and caused the unresponsiveness of both service roles.

WARNING: You may already know it, but just to be clear on this: the Configuration Manager takes some time to do it’s work. So be calm and watch the application log for MSI events, stating a successful (de)installation before rebooting. This is true for both the ConfigMgr Roles and Client Agent.

I did the following to solve it:

• Removed the Management Point Role (in ConfigMgr)
• Reboot
• Reinstalled the Management Point Role
• Removed the ConfigMgr Client Agent (ccmsetup /uninstall)
• Removed the PXE Role (in ConfigMgr)
• Reboot
• Removed the WDS Role (Windows Server)
• Reboot
• Reinstalled the WDS Server Role (no configuration after that of course)
• Reinstalled the PXE Role
• Reinstalled the CCM Client Agent
• Reboot

Yes I know: lots of lots of reboots. You may skip them if you dare, please drop me a line if it work anyway.

After that, all components went to green in the system state view and the PXE service started to respond as expected.

Tags: Configuration Manager, Microsoft, PXE, System Center