Windows Deployments randomly fail to join domain

Brass Contributor

My office has been deploying Windows 11 via an SCCM's Task Sequence using PXE Boot. We recently started noticing that out of every 10 image deployments 1 to 3 of them may fail to join the domain. We have recently deployed Server 2022 Domain Controllers and I'm in the process of decommissioning the 2012 R2 servers.

I did some initial research and I initially thought perhaps the account being used to join the machines to the domain needed to be a domain admin but that didn't seem to make much of a difference so I changed it back to a simple domain user. I'm not the one handling the imaging so I don't have direct access to the failed machines and so far I have been unable to re-produce the issue in my testing.

Does anyone have any ideas as to why this may be failing? Is there a specific log on either the imaged machine, the SCCM server, or even a domain controller that may give me an indication as to why the "Apply Network Settings" task in the Task Sequence is failing to join the domain on these machines?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

2 Replies
Is the join step failing or the machine doesn't join even when the step executes successfully? smsts.log, panther logs should give you clues.
Since I haven't seen a machine fail first hand I'm not sure. I have requested those logs from the imaging team the next time they have a failure.