HenryI did an experiment, a simple multicast send and receive on a private network contains only the Access Point and one station. The results are:

With the station sends and the Access Point receives multicast data using 224.0.0.1, the rate is over 20 Mbit/sec. With the Access Point sends and the station receives multicast data using 224.0.0.1, the rate is over very slow even less than 2 Mbit/sec.
I have no clue!!

@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.

@MarkP said in What should I expect speed wise from multicast?:

If I remember correctly Unicast decompression is done on the client and Multicast decompression is done on the server.
We run all our images uncompressed for multicast purposes.

If you’re setting your compression down to 1, that’s probably your problem. Leave compression at the default, 6. You’ll need to re-upload after you change this value.

@forte647 I believe the method you were using hasn’t been valid for some time now, this one should always work though.

@forte647 Too bad you got one of those ugly NICs running the r8169 driver. We have seen a lot of trouble with those lately. If I remember correctly this was an auto-negotiation issue most times. As George already said, can you try setting link speed to static GbE or 100M Fast Ethernet on your managed switch and try again? Please keep an eye on the link LEDs (switch and NIC) as well.

Are we allowed to use your picture in the wiki once we figure this issue out? As you are within a private IP range this shouldn’t be an issue privacy wise. Or we can mask the IP and MAC information if you don’t want to see those in the wiki.

@george1421 The article I am working on (don’t find the time to do get this finished) is linked in my signature…

@Junkhacker said:

worth noting here is that if you create a “Mobile/Quick Image Access Only” type account you can use the pxe menu for what you want but the info will not work to log into the web interface. slightly more secure since that way you’re not sending out the admin username/password as plain text to every host that pxe boots.

So using that method, they can create a new account with “Mobile/Quick image access only” and plug that user’s username and pass into the script below to make it more secure. Nice.

@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. 🙂