During a recent transition from 2007 to 2012 at a client site we encountered an oddity when working through getting a task sequence to properly deploy from distribution point issue. As you are likely aware ConfigMgr 2012 changed the structure of distribution points, for the better, but with that brought changes to management of packages and OS Deployments. Chiefly the checkbox that we all know and love to install from distribution point in ConfigMgr 2007 is now a drop down box in ConfigMgr 2012. If you attempt to select it from a package created with the standard wizard you will likely see that the deploy from DP option isn’t there.
The solution to this is to copy the content to a package share on distribution points. This is effectively mirroring the old DP hierarchy in 2007 and it will increase the amount of disk space consumed if you chose to use this functionality.
Figure 1 – A required option to have a package run from the DP
Once you set this option and the package has copied to the package share you can now change your deployment for that package to install from the DP. Great! Problem solved you might think. For OSD, this must be done for each and every package in the task sequence. What we ran into is that after doing this in our task sequence, going top to bottom on each and every app, image, driver package in the list, we still couldn’t change the OSD deployment to install from the DP.
What we ended up discovering is that the default ConfigMgr 2012 client package, which is often used in the task sequence, is completely locked out from being modified. This includes the option to copy the content to the package share. Why this is locked down we don’t know but we can surmise that Microsoft wanted to limit any manipulation of the package. This should down the road make transitions between client versions easier on us administrators.
Figure 2 – A “locked” ConfigMgr client package.
The solution is to create a new client package and utilize that just for OSD purposes. To accomplish this you can either utilize the MDT 2012 integration with ConfigMgr, or create a new package for the client install, pointing at the client folder under your installation directory. You are using MDT 2012 with ConfigMgr aren’t you?
With MDT integrated execute a new MDT Task Sequence wizard and when walking through the steps ensure that you chose the option to create a new ConfigMgr client package rather than use the existing one. I won’t cover how to do this as it’s been well documented elsewhere.
The client package generated by MDT or manually will be “unlocked”. Once you have set the new client package to copy to a package share, in addition to the other task sequence components you will be able to deploy directly from the distribution point.
Figure 3 – An “unlocked” ConfigMgr client package.
Figure 4 – The Access content directly from a distribution point… option
Hopefully this helps anyone that has run into this issue. We skipped creating a new client package on our first pass through when migrating our task sequences over from 2007 as I suspect a lot of people will. I rarely ever had MDT 2010 create a new client package in ConfigMgr 2007 as it was never required. Guess this will become a new default step on new deployments going forward.
