Some hosts are unable to get an address through DHCP

[mageta52]

@Sebastian-Roth I’m afraid I have not gotten to imaging multiple clients at once yet, is it possible to image a bunch of them at a time using unicast? If so, what is the purpose of even having the multicast feature?

[Sebastian Roth]

@mageta52 Unicast vs. multicast is like trying to explain the same topic to several people one at a time vs. giving a speech where the audience is more or less just listening. Sure you can unicast to a bunch of computers and I know people who use unicast for mass-deployment. So yes it works. But being kind of a network guy for me this feels like a huge wast of resources as your switch(es) need to shuffle around a lot of extra packets just for the sake of it.

That said give unicast a try. Put a couple of your machines together in a group and start a unicast deploy for that group…

[Wayne Workman]

@mageta52 A tip, I limit my fog server’s maximum connections to 2.

So when I fire up a imaging task of 30 computers, only two run, the rest wait in line until a slot is open and then begin.

[mageta52]

@Wayne-Workman

Why do you limit it to only 2 at a time? Is it faster?

[Wayne Workman]

@mageta52 For me, it is. It might be different for you.

So, if you start 10 at once, each successive one that starts runs a bit slower.

This slowness does not speed up if bandwidth is freed up by other hosts completing.

So, the slowest one is always the last to finish and it takes forever.

By limiting it to two here at my work, the two run at full speed, the only limiting factor is the target host’s speed of writing to disk.

My recommendation is to see how many you can run simultaneously before you detect any slowdown with the later joining hosts. Minus one from that number and that’s the sweet spot.

[mageta52]

@Wayne-Workman So, we run open dhcp on our main network. What I’m not sure about, is how to point that towards the fog server if a client is PXE booting and looking to connect.

[Tom Elliott]

@mageta52 Windows DHCP:

DHCP Scope (global or individual) -> Option 66 = ip address/hostname of where to get PXE information (FOG Server IP Address).

DHCP Scope (global or individual) -> Option 67 = filename to try to get from the PXE server (undionly.kkpxe).

[Wayne Workman]

@mageta52 also, after doing what @Tom-Elliott said, you can setup UEFI support as well by following this: https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=BIOS_and_UEFI_Co-Existence

[mageta52]

@Wayne-Workman Thanks guys, I’ll try to experiment with these options, again, it will probably have to wait until next week. The schedule is insane right now.

[Sebastian Roth]

@Wayne-Workman said:

So, if you start 10 at once, each successive one that starts runs a bit slower.
This slowness does not speed up if bandwidth is freed up by other hosts completing.

Unicast is just the wrong “tool” to send out lots of identical data to many clients… Sorry, couldn’t hold it back.

[Wayne Workman]

@Sebastian-Roth I agree. But I also don’t have access to my building’s switches to fix multicast.