Issue
Fortunately it doesn't happen to many times, but I've seen a couple of times now that a company ordered computers that are pretty good priced, but pieced together by your local friendly neighborhood computer store. No standard HP, IBM, Dell or other well-established brand, but an original clone. One thing that can go wrong in this construction is that all BIOS are filled with the same Serial Number. More often than not, the supplier also doesn't offer a tool to change this.
Almost all the time, these computers will do what they are supposed to do without any issues. One problem will arise though, when trying to Provision multiple of these machines at the same time. If you start these machines, you will see in the ldprovision.log that provisioning will detect the serial number. When the first computer starts the provisioning template, it will create a task. Every next computer with the same serial number will think that task applies to it. So, if computer 1 is at step 2 in the template, computer 2 will start and think it immediately needs step 3, etc. This results in 1 big chaos.
Resolution
The workaround for this involves some changes in your Boot.wim file.
ALWAYS MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A GOOD RECENT BACKUP OF THE BOOT.WIM FILE BEFORE MAKING THESE CHANGES!
Mount the .wim file. In the mounted wim file, find the x:\windows\system32\startnet.cmd file and open this in notepad.
To mount the .WIM file:
/Mount-Wim /WimFile:<path_to_WIM_file>
{/Index:<image_index> | /Name:<image_name>}
/MountDir:<target_mount_directory> [/readonly]
Mounts the WIM file to the specified directory so that it is available for
servicing. /ReadOnly sets the mounted image with read-only permissions.
Examples:
DISM.exe /Mount-Wim /WimFile:C:\test\images\myimage.wim /index:1
/MountDir:C:\test\offline
Go to the end of the file. There will be a line 'This is Provisioning'. Just below this, add these lines:
REM ----CUSTOM LINES ADDED TO AVOID DUPLICATE SERIAL NUMBER CHAOS---
net stop winmgmt
ren x:\windows\system32\wbem\*.dll *.org
ren x:\windows\system32\wmi*.dll *.org
REM ---- END CUSTOM LINES ADDED TO AVOID DUPLICATE SERIAL NUMBER CHAOS---
Unmount the .WIM file, saving the changes, and re-deploy your PXE representatives.
By disabling all WMI we basically deny LANDesk the possibility to detect serial number. It will detect another unique identifier and each and every computer will start and finish it's own task.
BUT, because WMI plays an important part in the later parts of Provisioning, make sure 1 of the first steps in Provisioning is to enable WMI again.
For this, create a CMD file on the share where the imagetools are located. The contents of this file should be:
copy /y x:\windows\system32\wbem\*.org x:\windows\system32\wbem\*.dll
copy /y x:\windows\system32\*.org x:\windows\system32\*.dll
net start winmgmt
Now, after mapping drives in your Provisioning Template, add an Execute File action to run this command file. Later actions like HII will have full WMI available again.