Distribution Point Pre-Requisits

Installing a Distribution Point for ConfigMgr (SCCM) can be as simple as adding a site server and selecting the distribution point role, most of the time the install is flawless but it can take what feels like as ice age to complete as ConfigMgr will install IIS and the other pre-requisits.

Myself, I prefer to pre-install the pre-requisits myself to speed up the installation process.
If, like me your impatient then add the features/roles below for a basic distribution point.

• Remote Differential Compression
• Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) 
• Web Server (IIS)
• IIS Configuration:
• Application Development: 
• ISAPI Extensions
• Security: 
• Windows Authentication
• IIS 6 Management Compatibility:
• IIS 6 Metabase Compatibility
• IIS 6 WMI Compatibility.

If you intend to also have PXE support on your distribution point, also add the Windows Deployment Services role but DO NOT configure it.

Configure PXE in SCCM 2012 (R2) failing with error 0x80041001

When configuring a DP as a PXE point you might see this line in the distmgr.log file stating SCCM failed to configure PXE. “CDistributionManager::ConfigurePXE failed; 0x80041001″

 Now, in SCCM 2012, config manager itself will usually want to do all the configuring of WDS and creating the RemoteInstall folder on the DP, but may not in all cases be successful.
If you see WDS is being installed, but no RemoteInstall folder and the error above in the log, try the following:

1. Deactivate PXE on DP from the Management Server and choose to not automatically uninstall WDS
2. Uninstall WDS from DP and restart
3. Install WDS from Server Manager and restart
4. Activate PXE on DP.

You should now soon see the RemoteInstall folder being created and boot images that you have specified as PXE bootable will be populated in the SMSImages folder.

Error importing drivers into SCCM 2012 SP1

While attempting to resolve what I thought was a malformed driver, I removed the Intel Chipset driver from SCCM. Upon attempting to re-import the driver again I was presented with this error (found in the DriverCatalog log).

“Import failed as \\server\share\driverpath\* is a Reparse Point that SMS does not support via downloads.                 DriverCatalog  06-03-2013 14:24:23”

It turns out to be a problem when the driver source location is hosted on a Server 2012 platform with data De-duplication enabled. After much googling, I found this post on technet.

"please be aware that you can run into issues with using server 2012 de-dupe.  ConfigMgr does not currently support re-parse points, so if you attempt to import a driver package or something else that has a re-parse point in it, it will fail."

One solution is to delete the files from the package source and re-copy, this will remove the re-parse points from the De-duplication database and allow SCCM to import the driver. 

The other is to exclude any directories that are used as replication parents from the data de-dupe schedule. Package source, Driver source and OS installation/updates sources should *not* be de-duped. It's annoying not being able to de-dupe these folders but it's safer than having driver packages suddenly (and randomly) become corrupted.

It's a shame that SCCM 2012 R2 still doesn't support re-parse points as we were enjoying a 71% de-dupe rate. Maybe in the next version Microsoft will fix this problem.

Fingers crossed !