Multicasting
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@george1421 @Goll420 I have worked on the multicast tasking/finishing code just before the release of FOG 1.5.9 because there were issues when you schedule a test not via the group but by creating a named multicast session. I thought I had this all tested and working correctly but I might be wrong. I will need to get a test setup ready and see if I can replicate the issue as described.
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I’ve just done another 24 machines using Multicast which worked beautifully with the deployment, done in under 4 mins! These did not rejoin the session after completion, however then I hit another small issue as rEFInd would not proceed any further than initializing.
If I removed the network cable and rebooted, they went into Windows perfectly.
I also tried with SANBOOT but then the FOG client would countdown from 10 and just loop to itself (go back to 10).
Not sure if this is related. These machines were HP 430 G7’s so will be on the same BIOS as the 440’s.
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@Goll420 said in Multicasting:
I also tried with SANBOOT but then the FOG client would countdown from 10 and just loop to itself (go back to 10).
I might be getting my threads mixed up, but if these are uefi systems SANBOOT exit mode should not work because its a BIOS exit mode. You need to use rEFInd as an exit mode for uefi systems. Under the global settings, they should be defaulted to bios exit: SANBOOT and uefi exit: REFIND
Its great that you have the multicast working. When it works it works really well, when it doesn’t then its the infrastructure that needs to be tweaked. Mutlicast is very dependant on your network stack than unicast (single deployment) imaging. I know some universities that can reimage their entire computer lab between classes. They can jump between ubuntu and windows for 30 computers in just a few minutes.
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@george1421 Sorry George, I was just reading the other thread in regards to refind not working too so I can see how they could be muddled up.
Yes this is the default setting, however refind just doesn’t go past Initializing.
I did some Dynabooks last week (dreadful machines) and refind worked just fine and dandy with those, but that was using unicast. Not sure if that’s related or not but wanted to give the full picture.
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Updating the binary has worked fine, they are now booting into Windows when the client menu times out.
So back to the initial problem, it’s seems to be a problem when using RAW images or drives with Bit Locker enabled.
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@Goll420 said in Multicasting:
Updating the binary has worked fine,
Updating the binaries to what version? 0.11.0?
Bitlocker:
Well bitlocker, I was wondering why/how you expected a bitlocker protected volume from one computer to be useful on a second computer. Its kind of the point of full disk encryption.
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@george1421 said in Multicasting:
Updating the binaries to what version? 0.11.0?
Bitlocker:
Well bitlocker, I was wondering why/how you expected a bitlocker protected volume from one computer to be useful on a second computer. Its kind of the point of full disk encryption.
Yes to 0.11.0
I totally agree, and I did suggest to the guy who prepared the image to remove it; he said he had done but FOG still found the disk to be encrypted.
Anyhoo, thanks for your help with all of this. The software and support from you guys is marvellous.
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@george1421 said in Multicasting:
@Goll420 bitlocker ref: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/10824/image-upload-deploy-taking-a-long-time/15
Very interesting, thank you. I imagine this was the problem for these machines.
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@Goll420 said in Multicasting:
I’ve set the remaining 8 going now, but I omitted the WOL part and started them manually. See if it makes any difference.
I never said before that this was a RAW image as the drive was encrypted with Bit Locker. I noticed an error on the end of the deployment on the hosts and then the reboot.
The tasks still show spinning and the hosts have all gone back to the deployment screen amd sitting there waiting for it to begin.
Logs show that the Multicast has finished, but I believe it’s this error that is stopping it progressing any further.Sorry for the long delay. Time is sparse at the moment and digging into such things usually takes a bit. I just tested multicasting several times and they all worked perfectly fine finishing the task. I am fairly sure that what you describe is caused by some kind of “checkout” issue where hosts are don’t properly report back to the FOG server when finishing the multicast session. So it would be helpful to know what error message you see at the end. If you see this happening again you might want to take a look at the Apache and PHP logs (see my signature) on the FOG server to see if errors are reported there as well.
Image type being RAW shouldn’t play a role. As far as I can test and know the code this does not seem to be a general issue in the multicast code I reckon.