@george1421 @Sebastian-Roth

Thanks both for your help, I managed to get rid of the second IP address and the server is now multi-casting to 2 laptops.

@plegrand said in Multicast very slow:

Then there is 2 sessions running (test and test2) and all the target computers have about 1.15GB/min rate

Just so I’m clear on this. When you were able to get 4 computers imaging your transfer rate was 1.15GB/min? That’s still 19MB/sec. You are still above the 100Mb/s theoretical limit.

All the computers have 2 partitions and strangely the first partition is slower than the second : about 700MB/min rate

I can explain this. The number is based on an incorrect calculation. The issue is that first partition is pretty small, like 500MB. It transfers so fast that the speed numbers get skewed. The second partition is typically the contents of the 😄 drive. You can see this if you look at the disk manager in Windows. Look at the size of the first partition.

I might need to explain how image multicasting works. There is one computer (FOG Server) that is sending the image out. As each multicast client boots up it checks in with the multicast sender through a discovery process. The muticast sender (FOG Server) configures the multicast sender service to wait for X number of clients to check in before going, or after the first client checks in wait for XX seconds before going even if not all have checked in. Once the multicast stream starts, no other late clients can check in (they are blocked). So in the image stream the FOG server sends out the first block of data then stops. It waits for every multicast receiver (target computers) to respond with “OK!”. The FOG server will not send the next block until it hears “OK!” from every client. If something happens and one client didn’t get the block correctly it will send “Retrans” back to the FOG server and the fog server will resend that block back to the client computer (while the others sit and wait until everyone replies with “OK!”. This is why we say multicasting can only go as fast as the slowest computer in the multicast stream. Consider you have 4, 8-core desktops all with SSD drives and one with a Penitum-4 and a slow HDD. If you imaged them all in one stream the 8 core systems would image at the rate the Penitum-4 system can write data to its slow HDD. If you have a system with a failing hard drive if the block transferred to it’s checksum doesn’t match the checksum of the block on the disk it will send a “Retrans” command back to the FOG server while the other clients wait. The point is when everything works it works well, when you have one bad actor everyone suffers.

@Guillaume-IT As well take a look at the Storage Node definition while you are in the web UI and make sure to correct the interface information there.

@virtualdxs Definitely will make it into the official build as soon as I find a bit more time to properly fix this.

@Sebastian-Roth Great !!! Thank you again.

Hey george1421,

Thanks for the response.

To clear things up a bit. We do have multicast working across vlans, the issue is more the reliability. On one vlan only certain models (Dell e5430s, Dell 3380s) will multicast with others (Dell 3340s, Dell 3350s, Dell 3390 2in1) get to the gparted screen and just sit like they are waiting additional computers to join. Then on both of the vlans if you need to cancel the multicast tasks and try to kick if off again, it seems to be hit or miss if the host get past the gparted screen and start imaging. Seems I need to wait a certain amount of time before trying to kick off the job again. I haven’t nailed down that minimum wait time…seems to be 15 min or less. If I do it too soon it just sits at the gparted screen.

So that is why I decided to look at the Storage Node approach. I then came across the wiki article about Storage management.

https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Managing_FOG#Storage_Manangement

In the Storage Management section it talks about Storage Groups and multicasting via the Storage Group’s Group Master Node. I was unclear if I could make sure hosts on a vlan hit the Group Master Node on that vlan. Maybe I was adding wishful thinking.

Thanks

Randy

@george1421

Thank you for your answer. You can close the ticket. I will do your technique.

Best regards.

@george1421 said:

adapter was handled by the cdc_ether driver

Got to be careful with this. I do remember we have had issues with this cdc_ether driver in the past. Please search the forum for this. I think we even tossed it out of our kernel builds for some reason…

@Quazz

Perfect,
You resolv my problems.

The first step OK :
Web Interface -> Users -> List ALL Users -> fog -> Change password

The second point OK :
Edit the file /var/www/fog/lib/fog/config.class.php:

nano /var/www/fog/lib/fog/config.class.php define (‘DATABASE_PASSWORD’, “MdpROOTsql”);

The FOG server is still functional in the Web and the database requires a password to enter!

Everything is good for this open ticket. I thank you for the efficiency of your response.

Continue like this.
Best regards.

@george1421 said in Adding storage nodes:

For your esxi server, how many network links does it have into your networking infrastructure? 2? or is it 10GbE?

The ESXi host is on a segmented network and has 4 physical adapter connections but I don’t think all of them are being used. I’m pretty sure the number is two because I’ve been talking to our network team about the possibility of going to 10GbE which they say will be a possibility down the road but not right now. I’ll definitely test deployments thoroughly before pulling the plug on the current/physical node.

Thanks for the tips about adding a LAG group and/or changing the location of /images, good to know about those options.

@mpatel said in Imaging over WAN:

now how do i go about transferring my exiting fog setup to new box including images that i have.

May I ask you to open a fresh topic on this question just so don’t mix things up too much and people can find things more easily in the forums. Take a look at export/import the image definitions and we’ll give you more of the details in the other topic.

Marking this as solved.

You can do it XD
First you must to know the name of the System product want to deploy.

Go to reports -> Inventory Reports If you have the lastest dev-branch version, you can filter by System Product. If you don’t have this last version, in the report will appears all the hosts Copy the System Product string that you want to deploy Go to Host menu And paste the string in the search box Create a new group with the results

@Sebastian-Roth Thank you for your advice. What you said seemed to be my issue. All I did was uncomment option routers and replace the IP with my DHCP server IP. I can get into the FOG splash screen now. Thanks!

@imt_fog If you boot the machine in question in debug mode, you should be able to run parted -l manually and check the flags.

I don’t think this is caused by such, however, but interested in seeing the results.

Worth noting that partitions that go through the checks but fail to resize get marked as fixed size as well (to prevent issues during deploy)

@Jedi exactly this.

@Leigh-Elgar said:

is there an option to or could there be an option to, allow identical MAC addresses to be added as additional MAC addresses

As of now the MAC address table has a UNIQUE constraint in the database. Sure something we could (and need to) change in the long run. I am afraid to say that there is no quick solution to this.

I have reboot the server yesterday,
Now updating database is very fast.
And I receive mails for task results…

I think the problem appeared when I set “FOG_EMAIL_ACTION”.

Thanks for your answers

Sorry for the late reply… Tried on another computer, and I cannot get the FOG menu to appear (this computer has never registered on that FOG server).

@george1421 You weren’t kidding about the 10 minutes, that was easy! There was another article on DNSMASQ that I had looked at before putting up this post, which looked mega complicated. Likely it was intended to do more than just PXE stuff. I haven’t deployed anything, but I registered a computer successfully after booting to PXE, so now I just have to migrate from laptop to server. w00t!