One odd thing with gpxelinux.0: tftp actually seems to be slower - so with it it’s http or nothing as far as I can see.

So, in the end I stuck with gpxelinux.0, I found that acronis still boots on most machines - and things like Hirens and Spinrite boot on practically all machines. For those machines that don’t boot, sometimes booting off a CD created with [url]http://rom-o-matic.net/[/url] works. So in any case, I now have the speed I was after with sufficent stability for it to be useful - not as stable as pxelinux.0, but just about enough.

Well, by crashed I mean rebooted.

OK, so I managed to almost solve the issue twice.

1/ Chainloaded iPXE from pxelinux.0, was able to access iPXE commandline and perform commands but it was unstable

2/ replaced pxelinux.0 with gpxelinux.0 (and the associated vesamenu.32 and memdisk files). This actually allowed me to transfer via http wich reduced my time from around 1 minute to around 1 second. The (acronis) ISO even booted, but it got to the part where it changes the screen mode to display some graphics, and crashed. My config for this was:

LABEL Acronis HTTP
kernel [url]http://192.168.1.1/pxeserver/memdisk[/url]
initrd [url]http://192.168.1.1/pxeserver/acronis.iso[/url]
append iso

Yes, it does load the complete iso into memory. As my iso’s are around 60-150MB this should be fine if the transfer were running even at my measly 100mbps network speed, but unfortunately it’s only managing ~10mbps (~1MB/s). I think as you suggest tftp is probably the limiting factor here. I will report back if I achieve any speed gains.

[quote=“chad-bisd, post: 8737, member: 18”]At this point it’s syslinux loading vesamenu.c32 loading the default menu loading your custom options. Fog isn’t even involved at this point.[/quote]

Actually I’ve just re-read what you’ve written and that’s not correct. It’s loading delldiags.iso, using memdisk, just as I am and it’s doing it a lot faster than I’m able to. Are there settings for tftp that I need to tweak? Could there be an issue with memdisk?

I know, that’s why I posted in the Linux Problems thread rather than the Fog one. I can’t find a community for pxe booting itself.

I don’t think tftp is my main issue, this video ([media=youtube]KYp-XVPxg3I[/media]) shows at 7:30 someone downloading a 8mb iso in 2 seconds, that’s far faster than I’m managing.

So it’s meant to be limited to around 1mbps?

I’ve set up fog using virtualbox and ubuntu server, I’ve managed to get both real and virtual clients connecting and I’ve added to the default config to add a few ISOs to boot from. I’m running over a 100mbps network and when I copy the ISOs on and off the server using my samba share I get around 100mbps, when I boot the same ISOs I seem to get only around 10mbps (it takes around a minute to load a 60mb iso into memory) both when using a virtual and real client. I’ve been googling for the last day to try and find out what could be causing it, but I’m at a loss.