Multicast Fails with PartImage
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First of all I must add to the chorus of praise about FOG 1.2. The Web GUI in particular has vastly improved and is much more usable. Kudos to the development team.
That said I have encountered an issue which does not seem to have been reported on the forums. In testing out the new FOG server, one of the features we explored was multicasting. It would seem to work. In other words the task would be created, the computers would wake up, the task would execute, and it would seem to complete. But the computers would not boot up. After PXE booting they’d just stop at a blank screen with a flashing underscore and nothing more would happen. Restarting the multicast service did not help. This same image went fine when unicast to one or even multiple computers. Even swapping out the lone cat 5 cable for a cat 5e one did not help. Ultimately I went into Partition Information under Client Information in the PXE Boot Menu and found there was only one partition (not two like there should be), neither was set to boot, neither was primary, and the partition table was loop. In short, it does not seem to have copied the image correctly or at all.
The solution was to use a newer image. The earlier one had been created in FOG .32 using PartImage. I multicast an image created in the current version with PartClone and everything went fine. The computer booted into Windows just like it should. Thus it seems that there is some sort of problem involving images created using PartImage and multicasting.
We will not be affected much. I’ve never used multicasting since it takes too long and we’ll be updating the images before our next round of imaging anyway. But in case others have different circumstances I’ve posted this here.
Here are the server specs:
FOG version 1.2
Debian 7.6 OS
All computers Optiplex 780s -
Thanks for letting us know, personally, I am like you, I don’t really use the Multicast features, just when someone says it’s not working so I can see what it is doing
Thanks for all the information it may help in finding the culprit and fixing it!
Of course if you troubleshoot further, feel free to leave some notes.
