Slow GhostCast

[sqdge]

So I thought I would spend the summer making sure that all our computers in the ICT Suite were identical to each other. I was able to create the image over the network very quickly. However, depoloying the image through GhostCast to the other computers is taking forever.

 

At the moment, it is due to complete in 4 weeks time. I am certain that it is all using the correct and most up-to-date network drivers, and have searched for any other factor that could slow it down (it claims it's going at 4mb/min...but I actually think it's going a lot slower than that).

 

Has anybody else had this problem?

[FN-GM]

how many machines are you deploying the image to at one time?

[everton4europe]

I have seen this before, but never found a solution.

 

But what i did find was that if you start a couple of sessions using the same image and only have 2 pc's going to each ghost cast it ran at a reasonable speed. (2 ghost cast's on the server 4 remote pc's)

[6Foot2]

We have. The network was saturated with traffic. We are currently imaging off the network with dedicated Ghost servers. Not ideal as we have to transport the servers to the rooms where imaging is required. Once imaging is finished we reconnect the stations to the network and then give them their station names. What a performance. I think our problems are down to the 3Com switches not being configured properly. I have tried to address this, but the switches seem to 'resist' any changes made or 'forget' the changes the next time there is a power cut. I wanted Cisco switches when the new network was installed but:

 

1. Our network provider would not have supported us with these in place.

2. They were deemed too expensive anyway.

[Geoff]

There could be several reasons:

 

1) The drivers your using are buggy/wrong version.

2) Your network infrastructure is poorly designed/faulty/overloaded.

3) Your using the Unicast ghostcasting setting and are ghosting to many PCs.

[sqdge]

There could be several reasons:

 

1) The drivers your using are buggy/wrong version.

2) Your network infrastructure is poorly designed/faulty/overloaded.

3) Your using the Unicast ghostcasting setting and are ghosting to many PCs.

 

1) I'm certain they're the most up-to-date and correct drivers available. I went through a lot of trial and error to find them. Too much "error" for my liking!

2) It is. But it manages to pump out MSIs at a rate of knots, so I would have thought it would do the same for Ghost images.

3)I'm fairly certain I will have selected multicast. You've got me worrying now.

 

I'm just scared that if I stop it I won't find a quicker solution, meaning that I have to start again. There were a few computers in the suite that didn't like the GhostCast so I might see if it is quicker to do them disk to disk individually.

[Geoff]

You can verify all 3 situations with a packet sniffer. Additionally, SNMP counters on your switches will give you more clues.

[plexer]

Do these machine have sata hard drives?

 

If so have you passed the -noide switch to the ghost client?

 

Ben

[sqdge]

Do these machine have sata hard drives?

 

If so have you passed the -noide switch to the ghost client?

 

Ben

 

I heard about that. They do have SATA drives, but have heard mixed reviews about whether -noide is needed or not.

 

If it is, where do I pass the switch (I'm a bit of a ghost novice).

[BaccyNet]

We had this kind of issue a few years back when the council had recently changed our router. For some reason the router felt the need to intercept all the Ghost packets through it's 10mb/s card and then let it pass to the machines.

 

Got quite interesting as the router began getting bogged down with it all thus losing the Internet

 

Dont know what they did to fix it but it doesnt do it anymore, might be the same problem for you?

[Geoff]

Indeed, that sort of behaviour is caused by Traffic Storm Control.

[sfoord]

We had the same problem with 3com switches and ghost. After talking to 3Com we fixed it by disabling Broadcast Storm, IGMP & Spanning Tree. See screen shot.

[mullet_man]

Ghosting is very strange: We ghosted 6 machines based in two offices this morning at a total time of around 2 and half hours, and then just before we left did a IT suite of 28 machines in around 50 mins.

 

Very strange.

[gnarlyc]

Anytime we have had this problem it has been due to one or more flaky NICs. We usually break the group down into smaller groups, and we usually find the 'bad' NICs about the time we finish... But, then we know which PC gets a new NIC!

 

Alan

[sLiDeR]

What size is ur image?? Also whats the backbone to ur network?

[Geoff]

Anytime we have had this problem it has been due to one or more flaky NICs. We usually break the group down into smaller groups, and we usually find the 'bad' NICs about the time we finish... But, then we know which PC gets a new NIC!

 

If you have switches that report networking faults (eg, ProCurves) and you know how your wiring works, you can trace the faulty NIC/wiring that way too.

[Jobos]

We had the same problem the other year and fixed it like Sfoord said and disabled IGMP on the switch.

[carlosdss]

Have you tried fixing the Server NIC to full duplex 100mbps. The autonegotiation can cause this sort of thing.

Also as a previous person stated, turn off spanning tree and IGMP.

Good luck

[badboyvtec]

Ghost will slow down to the slowest device on your network ie a printer 10mb. We unplugged all our printers here this summer for our imaging and this allows a decent speed when it works. We have diffenrt images for different rooms and use unicast option. Only problem with this option is that if one pc fails it cancels the whole lot in that session.

 

Create differnt sessions for different rooms and stagger them all so they are not all at the same time.

 

If you fail this make a dedicated ghosting server and carry it to each room then dissconnect the switch from the rest of the network for each differnt section of your network.

 

It has taken us the last couple of weeks to figure this strategy out and now we are nearly complete.

[DMcCoy]

Erm, you can just turn igmp on to get around that.