Posts made by forte647

Thanks for the info. It might be an underpowered CPU on the switch. All of my cables are fresh and give around 5.8 gb/s unicast, and all of the hardware I am imaging to is fresh out of the box.

Have a good week!

Server

• FOG Version: 1.4.0 fresh install
• OS: Ubuntu 14.04.5

Client

• Service Version: not sure
• OS: Win10 image to be deployed

Description

Hello, everyone. I had a question about multicast speeds. I have 20 machines set to image via multicast on a Netgear ProSafe S3300-52x switch. When I use multicast it transfers at about 2.30 ~ 2.32 GB/s. When I deploy a single image, it transfers at about 5.80 ~ 5.90 GB/s, and starting additional unicast transfers will still go 5.30~5.40 GB/s, but will start to drop off significantly after adding 3 or 4 more clients. Multicast definitely seems like the way to go when doing 10 or more computers, but is there a way to speed up multicast? I thought theoretically I should be getting closer to unicast speeds.

My network setup is pretty basic. All the machines in play are on the same switch and the switch is set to default settings. Is there anything I could tweak on the switch to speed it up? It doesn’t do anything besides provide network to the imaging bench.

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

@Wayne-Workman

All right I got. The lines:

DELETE FROM multicastSessions WHERE 1;
DELETE FROM multicastSessionsAssoc WHERE 1;

returned syntax errors “check your manual”. but truncating the two tables worked.

everything seems to work normally now. thanks, guys.

@Wayne-Workman

All right i’m at RC-7

@Wayne-Workman

Running Version 1.3.0-RC-4
SVN Revision: 5941

I ran
mysql -u root <-p password> fog
truncate table multicastSessions;
truncate table multicastSessionsAssoc;
exit;

and it’s asking for more arguments to truncate the tables. "you must specify either ‘–size’ or ‘–reference’

Hey again. I usually just name my multicast sessions “1” or “q” or whatever to go through my machines as fast as possible. But lately the old sessions have not been clearing. They don’t show up in the active task queue at the bottom of the image management page, but for example if I try to make another session called “1”, it tells me there’s already a session queued by that name, but it’s not in the list.

Any ideas on how to wipe my multicast task queue?

Thanks for the responses. Every machine is identical. Same model, processor, ram, HDD, NIC, all that. I’ve taken everything off the switch except 30 machines I plan to image + the server running FOG. I’ve verified that every port in use on the switch has a full 1000Mbps link. I just imaged the 30 on my switch at about 1.80gb/s but I’d still like to go a bit faster if you think that’s possible.

I’ve verified that Spanning Tree Protocol is enabled on all ports in RSTP mode.

1.8 gb/s is much better than 1 gb/s, but can anyone think of anything else?

My company recently switched to Probook 455 G3s, and I had the same issue after the switch. Something about the NIC in these laptops isn’t playing nice with undionly.pxe? I switched my boot file to ipxe.pxe and it worked. So maybe try using ipxe.pxe and see what happens.

Heya, guys.

During a unicast deployment deploying 1 image to 1 machine at a time, I can get speeds of about 5-6 gb/s, but when I multicast out to 7 machines, it slows down to 1 gb/s. Is this normal? I was under the impression that with multicast I could achieve speeds closer to 5 or 6 gb/s. All the machines (including the FOG server) are on a pretty new enterprise grade Netgear switch (S3300-52x ProSAFE stackable smart switch) There isn’t any packet shaping or any features like that enabled on the switch. I checked on the switch’s config page and verified that every connection is reading as a full 1000 Mbps.

Are there any other config settings I should look at, or is 1 gb/s transfer the best I’m going to get? Thanks for your time, any suggestions would be very helpful.

Perfect, thanks. I wasn’t getting an error. It just kept kicking back to the first menu. If it did throw an error, it appears and disappears too quickly for me to read it or capture it.

But thanks, man. I had some funky stuff set from before maybe.

Hello, everyone. A while ago I hardcoded a user/pass into Fog Trunk’s boot menu entries to remove a bit of user interaction to speed things up for my purposes. I updated to the latest (as of a few days ago haha) version from the git, and now I think some of my modifications are preventing me from accessing the deploy image feature.

So could someone send me the default config files for fog.deployimage and fog.multijoin as of 1.3.0-RC-4? Thanks, gang.

@george1421 i have 4 instances for “Hardware ID” for my NIC on the new laptops.

PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8168&SUBSYS_80F0103C&REV_15

PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8168&SUBSYS_80F0103C

PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8168&CC_020000

PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8168&CC_0200

is this what you were asking for?

Thanks for the suggestions. Unfortunately I was not able to get my hands on a reliable dumb switch. All our old dumb switches seem to have port issues and I cannot reliably rule out an issue with our switch.

I did try switching to ipxe.pxe and that worked. It will try and configure (net0 00:00:00:00:00:00) and then fail. It’ll try again with the correct address and succeed right after.

Another thing I tried in case this is helpful to anyone:
I grabbed this version of ipxe.iso from this page https://svn.code.sf.net/p/freeghost/code/trunk/packages/tftp/ and booted from that CD and it worked.

But yeah, changing the bootfile to ipxe.pxe works for the new and old HP machines. Thank you all for your help.

Changing the boot file to " undionly.kkpxe" didn’t seem to change anything. The old laptops will still find Fog. New ones will not.

We have 2 managed switches between the client and the DHCP server with nothing special set (still default settings). I’ll try plugging in two flat switches in a moment when no one needs the network.

Thanks for your help so far. I’ll be back momentarily with a results.

Hello. I’m having an odd issue with a specific model of HP laptop getting its DHCP info in PXE boot. I’ve been using Fog to image our HP Probook 4545s laptops just fine. We’re switching over to HP Probook 455 G3 laptops.

Only thing that has changed is the laptop model

The old 4545s laptops will still work as intended.

Any ideas on what to try? Let me know if more information is required.

@forte647 said:

Deleting those lines causes my Multicast Join entry to not work (like I can select it but it just knocks me back to the first menu). Is there a way to hard code the user and pass into the param of multijoin? If so, what would that look like? Like if I wanted to hardcode username “fog” and password “password”.

Sorry for the double post, but I got ballsy and tried it myself and this worked for me. My multijoin params are:

params
param mac0 ${net0/mac}
param arch ${arch}
param username fog
param password password
param sessionJoin 1
isset ${net1/mac} && param mac1 ${net1/mac} || goto bootme
isset ${net2/mac} && param mac2 ${net2/mac} || goto bootme

got rid of the first login line (I guess that’s the login prompt) and then changed the user/pass lines from ${username} to a username I wanted (default account fog) and its ${password} “password”.

Changing the default entry also worked, although in my mind I really wanted to arranged differently, but that’s okay too.

Thank you, guys.

Deleting those lines causes my Multicast Join entry to not work (like I can select it but it just knocks me back to the first menu). Is there a way to hard code the user and pass into the param of multijoin? If so, what would that look like? Like if I wanted to hardcode username “fog” and password “password”.

Hello! I had a couple of questions about tuning fog trunk to better suit my purposes. (I’m using 5958)

Multicasting has been going very well, but I wanted to know if there was a way to disable the password requirement to multicast and quick image in fog trunk. I mostly use fog to multicast a bench of machines, or quick image single ones.

How would I disable login requirement for the fog boot menu when imaging machines?

Also - is there a way to change the order of entries on the fog boot menu? For example, I’d like Multicast to be the first option. then Quick Image, then whatever.

Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks, guys!

@Wayne-Workman said:

If you liked that, FOG Trunk will blow your socks off.

As far as I know, imaging unregistered computers using FOG Trunk only works with Unicast.

You can set (in storage management) how many active tasks are allowed. I keep mine set at 2. Then you network boot all machines. 2 will start. The rest wait in line and automatically start.

Thanks for the suggestion to move to trunk, and thanks Quazz for the clarification on whether or not multicast worked. This is exactly what I wanted/needed!

For any wayward googlers:
I upgraded my install to trunk using these instructions: https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/Upgrade_to_trunk pretty straight forward.

After the upgrade completed, I went back to image management in the web gui, selected multicast image, started a new session for the amount of clients I wanted, netbooted each client to fog’s boot menu and selected join multicast session. it goes when the specified number of clients connect.

Wonderful. Thanks a lot, guys.

@Wayne-Workman said:

That’s a feature request. @Developers

However, I’ll tell you that perhaps you would be satisfied with FOG Trunk’s speed increases. I can deploy a 40GB image over 1Gbps LAN in about 6 minutes. And FOG Trunk has a better system for unicasting to unregistered computers. You can pick your images for one thing. At this very moment, it might be the way to go for you.

Is that just for unicasting or can I use multicast in that way as well with trunk? I was pleased with the transfer speed and everything (outside of needing to boot each client twice) of the multicast session for 15 laptops yesterday (the software is very nice and the web gui is conducive to my purposes and setup). I don’t want to have 15 unicast sessions firing.