Posts made by pjcard

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.

OK, I’m an idiot, I’d somehow overwritten the ramdisk image with the kernel, turning off quiet produced an error that made that clear (unreadable ramdisk image, essentially).

Now I can load the kernel, but I eventually just end up at a command prompt. If I type “acronis” there, it does some stuff (something with network interfaces then enumerating my drives) but then just dumps me back to the prompt. Do I need to run it from a graphical environment? Is there any way to automate whatever the solution to getting it to run is?

The error specifically is (with quiet off):

No filesystem could mount root, tried: romfs
Kernel Panic: Syncing VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown block (1,0)

I’ve also tried using the .dat files from the ISO like this:

[COLOR=#000000]KERNEL kernel.dat
APPEND initrd=ramdisk.dat ramdisk_size=64000 quiet vga=0x315[/COLOR]
[COLOR=#000000] [/COLOR]
[COLOR=#000000]Acronis starts to boot, but instantly gives a kernel panic saying it can’t access storage.[/COLOR]

Has anyone managed to do this? I’ve seen examples of people with Acronis in their boot menu, but they haven’t explained how they’ve done it or what version they’re using. I’ve added:

LABEL Acronis
kernel fog/acronis/memdisk
append iso initrd=fog/acronis/acronis.iso
MENU LABEL Acronis
TEXT HELP
Run Acronis True Image 2010
ENDTEXT
\n

But I get the program locking up either on first load, when first entering the GUI or when loaded the GUI but “Processing”.

Paul

EDIT: This does actually work, my issue was that I tried it on (1) a machine that won’t boot off the acronis CD either (2) a machine that randomly turns itself off and (3) a machine without a hard drive - the last one is important, it seems Acronis doesn’t like to run without a hard drive, somewhat understandably.
I’m still trying to run from the extracted kernel and ramdisk images, though, because they’re half the size, and will make boot times practical even on a 100mbps network.

This discussion is about booting hirens over the network, russed, I think you’re talking about something else.

Oh, don’t forget to change your IP settings if you do step 8
[url]http://fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Change_FOG_Server_IP_Address[/url]

Just installed FOG using a virtualbox running Ubuntu server (couldn’t see a need for a GUI) and found the process very smooth, steps for me were:

1/ Create fairly minimal machine on virtualbox
2/ Download Ubuntu server iso on host machine, mount in virtual machine, install using all default settings and no optional extras
3/ Download latest FOG .tar.gz from here using wget (Simpler than messing about with shared folders)
4/ Unzip and execute install script (A, Section 2)
5/ Enjoy watching the very well written script at work
6/ Set virtual machine network adapter to bridged, reboot virtual machine, use ifconfig to check that your real-world dhcp server is providing the virtual machine an ip
7/ Access web interface on host mchine using assigned IP (A, Section 2 again)
8/ At this point I gave my virtual machine a static address (B), and set my (Win 2k8) DHCP server’s option 67 and 66 to allow booting using FOG. (A, Section 3)

(A) [url]http://fogproject.org/forum/threads/how-to-install-fog-on-ubuntu.5/[/url]
(B) [url]http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/howto-ubuntu-linux-convert-dhcp-network-configuration-to-static-ip-configuration.html[/url]
[url]http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2009/09/the-ultimate-wget-download-guide-with-15-awesome-examples/[/url]