How To Set Up Deep Freeze

The problem: A motorcar in a frozen land loses all changes made to it at its adjacent reboot. This is great for keeping machines in a consequent land for each user every day in, for example, lab environments. However, when the machine does not come out of a frozen state during a maintenance window, changes to software managed by PDQ Deploy are lost the adjacent time it reboots. This can cause inconsistencies in lab environments and wreak havoc on reporting. How exercise you go about deploying to computers frozen with Deep Freeze? How can you proceed your changes from reboot to reboot?

Faronics has produced a nice utility to allow for Command Line management of the Deep Freeze agent on client machines. When used with PDQ Deploy this shifts responsibility of controlling state abroad from Deep Freeze Tasks to the PDQ Deploy panel itself.

Deploying to Computers Frozen with Deep Freeze

Step one: Grab yourself a re-create of DFC.exe. Y'all can get this from the downloads section of Faronic's website, only if not you lot can accomplish out to their support and they will provide you with a copy. Co-ordinate to the Deep Freeze comparison chart DFC is available in Deep Freeze Enterprise and Cloud. It is non offered in the Standard versions.

Step two: Configure an RDX file to enable Command Line access. You'll desire to edit a current 1 or create a new RDX file. On the passwords tab click Enable on one of the entries, change Type to Command Line, and provide a password. The password is alphanumeric and does not support special characters.

rdx config example 1

Step iii. Relieve and update your configuration on your target machines.

Step 4. Deploy DFC.exe to your lab computers.

For this I created a unproblematic Package that includes 1 file re-create stride. I placed a copy of DFC.exe in my PDQ Deploy repository and set up the deployment to "Push button". The target directory is C:\windows\system32. You could utilise C:\windows\SysWoW64, or any other directory that is in the target'southward PATH. This will make things a little easier in a further step.

Notation: Yous'll want to become into Deep Freeze and THAW the machines you are deploying this bundle to so that the copied file will really be there upon subsequent reboots.

Creating Your Deployment

Pace v. Create deployments wrapped effectually DFC

In this example, nosotros will utilize the Automobile Deployment package vii-Zip which is available from the Package Library. If you don't have access to the Package Library due to your license level, or only wish to do this with another package, the process is the aforementioned, so merely follow along modifying the package(s) that you intendance near. The merely slight difference y'all will see is that with Car Deployments things go into the Pre and Mail Deployment steps, so it looks different from a normal package, but is functionally identical.

Deploying to Computers Frozen with Deep Freeze

Hither's a rundown of what'southward included in the pre and post deployment steps:

Pre-Deployment Control Stride containing:

dfc.exe <yourpassword> /THAWNEXTBOOT

Add a Reboot Step. This allows the PDQRunner service to control the next bundle steps, and the machine will be thawed to the DFC command y'all ran in Step i.

Mail-Deployment Command Footstep containing:

dfc.exe <yourpassword> /FREEZENEXTBOOT

Add together another Reboot Footstep which will cause the machine to be Frozen after the step completes, and the deployment will testify as successful.

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