Udpcast February 2005

udpcast@udpcast.linux.lu

7 participants
11 discussions

UDPCast source code issues...
by Saikrishna Dasari 25 Apr '06

25 Apr '06

Hi Alain, I was studying the UDPCast source code for some experimental purposes. I have the following question. 1. The whole data to be transfered into is divided into slices which again contains a series of blocks to transfer. Can we consider the whole data to be transfered as a single slice ( By setting appropriate parameters in code) and what kind of performance issues we can expect if we do a change of this kind at code level. Thanks in advance, Sai --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Y! Messenger - Communicate in real time. Download now.

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Buggy tg3 ethernet
by Donald Teed 04 Apr '06

04 Apr '06

The option of ipappend 1 in the default file and retransmission of HELLOs in udp-sender (--rexmit-hello-interval) has been valuable to getting udpcast working with the Dell notebooks we have with Broadcom 5700 series ethernet. Today, with a slightly newer broadcom chipset appearing in the most recent shipment, we noticed that udp-receiver was intermittantly not showing the "hit any button to start transfer" message. With some trial and error I found that if I watched the tail of /var/log/message on the receiver (server) and waited for the messages on TX and RX flow control to complete before running udp-receiver, it would always initiate a good connection. If I had started the udp-receiver prior to the TX/RX flow control appearing in the message log (in which case there was no "hit any key" message), I could ^C the receiver, run it again and it would signify the ready state with 100% success. In conclusion, we have a workaround of starting udp-receiver after a few seconds past the client PXE machine booting and showing the udp-sender status ready (but not yet "hit any key..."). Another solution would be if udp-receiver also supported --rexmit-hello-interval. It isn't a flaw in the udpcast system but a kludge for a network device that is proving itself to be sluggish in initialization in general. --Donald Teed

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Re: [Udpcast] udpcast scalability?
by George Coulouris 26 Feb '05

26 Feb '05

I've managed to get reliable transfers to all 85 machines at this point (bad nic in the sender, I think). I'm still bottlenecking at 45Mbit or so, though, despite the fact that all machines are on switched copper gigabit. If fec is turned on (either 8x8/128 or 16x4/128), receivers disconnect throughout the transfer until only ~10 remain at the end. If fec is turned off, I get high retransmission rates (15-25%), but the transfer at least succeeds to all hosts. Again, I'm sending about 20G of data, which should take about an hour at 45Mbit. In practice, it takes about an hour and a half, and sometimes close to two hours. For simple point-to-point tests with udpcast (between 1 and 5 receivers), I can achieve higher bandwidths reliably (sending 128 megabytes at 80mbit), both with and without fec. It sounds like my issue is similar to Ramon Bastiaan's: http://lll.lgl.lu/pipermail/udpcast/2004-September/000298.html Ramon, have you had any luck?

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Udpcast image does not complete boot
by Jean-Paul Bauer 18 Feb '05

18 Feb '05

I am having problems booting any one of the cd and floppy images. The kernel starts booting up to the stage where it issues the following prompts: VFS: Mounted root (romfs filesystem) readonly. Mounted devfs on /dev Freeing unused kernel memory: 84k freed After this the boot process hangs. I used the same cd/floppy to boot another machine and it worked fine. I have recompiled the kernel and made a new image with only the modules that I need enabled and also tried using a monolithic kernel, all to no avail. I also tried reducing the ramdisk size to 32000, but that also didn't work. Using an image generated with the udpcast image generator and supplying all the configuration parameters also didn't work. The specs of the machine are: VGA controller: S3 Inc. Trio64V2 Ethernet controller: Intel 82557 Chipset: PIIX4 NIC: eepro100 RAM: 64MB CPU: Pentium MMX I am kind of stumped what could be going wrong ...

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[PATCH] Syslog use
by Ramon Bastiaans 08 Feb '05

08 Feb '05

Hi all, I don't know if this should be applied to the source tree, but perhaps some people will find this patch useful (I know we do). We wanted some additional logging from udpcast to debug our casting sessions, because it seems that the only thing logged to its logfile is messages like this: "Doubling slice size to 1024" We also prefer syslog in stead of the separate file for logging So I wrote this little patch. It logs more information (very usefull for udpcast's running in the background on a image server) and it logs it to syslog. Information being logged: * New connections * Why a cast starts (is min clients reached or max wait passed, etc) * Transfer start (+ what file,pipe,port,if,participants) * Transfer complete * Disconnects See attached .patch Kind regards, -- Ramon Bastiaans SARA - Academic Computing Services Kruislaan 415 1098 SJ Amsterdam

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rogue packet
by alexandre.letort＠club-internet.fr 06 Feb '05

06 Feb '05

Hi! I'am using udpcast to transfert disk Images from a server to several clients. The server box has one Network card and several virtual interfaces (eth0, eth0:0, eth0:1...). When I try to send a file to one client through one of the virtual interface(eth0:x) everything goes well. But when the client number increases (more than one) I get an error saying: Rogue packet received <eth0 IP address>:9001 expecting <eth0:x IP address>:9001 The command line used on the server is : udp-sender --file <filename> --interface eth0:x On the client: udp-receiver --file <filename> It seems that only the eth0 interface can be used bay udpcast. It works perfectly with this one. How can I get udpcast to work with my virtual interfaces Sorry for my bad English! Thank you for your help. regards Alex

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Re: Give parameters through isolinux.cfg
by Alain Knaff 06 Feb '05

06 Feb '05

On Wednesday 10 November 2004 10:42, Stephane wrote: > Hi, > > I've unsuccessfully tried to send a message to the list. > (I receive list's mail). > > I'm trying to solve the problem, contacting mailman... > But I would like to send you my post to see if you can help me: > ****************************************************************** > I would like to add precustomized images to a multiboot CD using isolinux. In that case, you need to instruct makeImage to give you the initrd (-i flag), rather than a finished cd or floppy image: /usr/lib/udpcast/makeImage -i initrd -k /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.10udpcast Then you store that initrd and the corresponding kernel on the CD, and add the following paragraph to your isolinux.cfg file: default linux label linux kernel vmlinuz append root=01:00 initrd=initrd (assuming that the initrd is still called initrd, and the kernel vmlinuz) Note: for 2.6 kernels, you need root=01:00, whereas for 2.4 kernels, you need root=/dev/ram0 > I would like to only have one image and send parameters through the 'label' > line in isolinux.cfg The label line is not acessible to the kernel, this is only for the boot loader's (Lilo, Grub, Syslinux) own usage (typically used as menu headers) However, you can add a limited amount of parameters to the append line: default linux label linux kernel vmlinuz append root=01:00 initrd=initrd umode=rcv auto=yes This passes the parameter umode=recv and auto=yes to udpcast, so it won't ask whether it should behave as a receiver or as a sender. Unfortunately, there is a limitation in the kernel, which limits you to 6 such parameters, if I remember correctly. > It would be nicer than customizing one image for each config. But what you can do is put those parameters that are not likely to change between each config into the initrd, and only leave those that change on the kernel command line, in order not to overflow the parameter count. Regards, Alain

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(no subject)
by John Allison 06 Feb '05

06 Feb '05

hello group i work for a school system and have been using UDPCast for a couple of years now with great results. but we just got in the new dell gx280 pcs. they have sata hard drivers and a broadcom gigabit ethernet card. i can not get the boot disk nor the cd to use either device. is there anyone who has add these devices to the /dev/ on the floppy or cd image? (John Allison )

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Custom iso
by Michael Williams 06 Feb '05

06 Feb '05

First let me thank you for udpcast, it has been a valuable tool for my school district. And now to what I'm here for, we have gotten a new batch of computers from Gateway with Marvell nic cards not supported with the current version of udpcast. I have attempted to build a custom iso with these new drivers following the instructions on the website. I used the 2.4.26 kernel sources and the rpm's from the site. I can't get the computers to boot to determine if the new drivers work. I'm sure I've just overlooked some small detail but I haven't been able to determine what. I downloaded the linux driver from the Marvell site; installed in 2.4.26 src tree and built kernel according to instructions on the site. I created the iso with the following command: ./makeImage -k /usr/local/lx/2.4.26-udpcast/linux-2.4.26/arch/i386/boot/bzImage -c udpcast1.iso --fullbox the resulting iso is then burned to cd and when booted gives the following error: Please append a correct "root=" boot option. kernel panic not able to mount root Thanks, Michael -- Michael Williams Haywood County Schools Technology Director Instructional Technology http://www.haywood.k12.nc.us (828) 627-8314

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Udpcast 20050206 released
by Alain Knaff 06 Feb '05

06 Feb '05

Udpcast 20050206 is now released. It has the following new features: * Ramon Bastiaans' syslog patch * SATA and SCSI support (for 2.6 kernels. There still is a module loading issue with this when running on a 2.4 kernel) * Improved layout of the embedded filesystem: formerly, a writable tmpdir was mounted over /lib in order to allow write access to the modules. However, this mounting also shadowed user-added shared libraries. The new version mounts over /lib/modules, leaving everything that is directly in /lib intact. * Support network cards that have a PCI device class of 0x680 rather than 0x200 (some nVidia cards do this...) Bugfixes: * Aliased interfaces (such as eth0:0) now work * Fixed some race conditions which could happen at end of transfer * Improved Cygwin compatibility * Cleanup in keyboard handling * Minor bugfixes in the makeImage script (bad test for symlinks, bad ramdisk identifier for 2.6 kernels, ...) External software upgrades: * Upgraded to busybox-1.00 * Upgraded to kernels 2.6.10 and 2.4.29 Regards, Alain

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Udpcast February 2005