Problem:
At several customer sites I do use the ENGL imaging toolkit. In phase three of the ENGL build process Windows does perform an auto admin login with predefined credentials which also does auto log in into the ZCMagent. This login then triggers a force-run bundle to install a bundle tree associated to this auto-admin-login user. So now these bundles get installed on the device. Occasionally I do run into teh issue that the domain login of the device is successful but the ZCM agent pops up cause it cannot authenticate the user (for 'whatever' reason; that's off topic here) to ZCM. If I then put in the credentials of the install user manually in the popped up ZCM login box the authentication is successful and the device build continues normally. It is today impossible to work around this situation somehow other than reboot the machine or login as the install user manually.
This situation is not limited to using ENGL building a desktop, this could also well happen using other solutions.
Solution:
A solution would be to be able to have a way to log into the zcmagent command line leveraging zac.
What I now could do is disable the ZCM user login while performing the auto admin login. Then after the desktop login into the system was succesful, the build script can perform a command line login into the zcmagent, which will then kick of the force run bundle installing the needed applications on the desktop. This way we can script logging into the zcmagent as a user (instead of using the Agent control bar icon) which allows us to control the (failed) login and adjust actions accordingly. Would be cool if a zac command could also check if my user login is succesful (so I can use that for checking in my script) and return usable error codes case a login would fail.
Benefit:
This would benefit both those who do scripted imaging and those who leverage like the ENGL Imaging Toolkit. This would allows us to controlling a image build process much better.
by: Sebastiaan V. | over a year ago | Application Mgmt
Comments
At windows login credentials are passed to the zcmagent for zcm user login, however, sometimes it would be nice to call the user login (ZCM userlogin) from commandline. FX after agent update when the suer is logged out of zen, but not windows.
Today we are forced to do a shutdown /l, and then turnaround time for the user is longer.
yes, also helpful for login in different domains or trees, deal with VPN's, automate rollout and so on.
This would be really useful. I have some laptops that use ZENworks, but don't use the OES Client or Active Directory, and have a registry key set to allow DLUs without an OES Client login. I've built a custom image for these laptops by hand in the past, but I'm trying to automate the process with ENGL. After spending quite a bit of time trying to make this work, I don't see any good way to do it without being able to script the login to the ZENworks Agent.
Being able to login command line is really usefull especially when imaging devices. This would really help us deploy devices in a stable way.
Lucky us, this seems to be sneaked into ZCM 2017 U3;
https://www.novell.com/communities/coolsolutions/cool_tools/auto-login-zenworks-adaptive-agent-using-pre-configured-response-file-using-zac-command-line-interface/
Thanks for posting that Cool Solutions link, Sebastiaan, that looks like exactly like what I need! I'll have to upgrade from U2 to U3 once I'm back from vacation and try it out.
Please note that as mentioned above it is available in all ZCM releases. Not just for U3. Hence if you have zone in any version prior to U3 should work.