I’m working on a System Center 2012 Configuration Manager course for TrainSignal and today was the day that I tackled the operating system deployment lesson. All was going really well up until the point that the system was attempting to determine how to communicate with the management point. Then, the task sequence used to deploy the OS simply failed and the machine shut down. Assuming that I had misconfigured something, I went back through the entire process with a fine toothed comb. Nothing.
Then, it hit me. In reviewing the smsts.log file on the bare metal client, it dawned on me that the client simply couldn’t FIND the management point. So, I double-checked the network settings.
It embarrasses me to no end to admit this, but I had used the wrong IP address for the DNS server in the DHCP scope for this particular lab. All of the other systems in use have static I P addresses except this single one. So, I fixed the scope and kicked the process off again and everything worked like a champ!
I share this shame in the hopes that it will help someone else somewhere down the line.