We have D620s from Dell. I included the wireless support module simply so we could grab the MAC from it for our notebooks database (we run a wget in the busybox shell against a web server CGI to send up this data before imaging).
In our case, the Linux kernel was crashing if the wireless antenae was powered on (small switch on side of notebook), so we made sure that switch was off prior to booting the clients.
--Donald Teed
On Wed, 10 Jan 2007, Jon Miller wrote:
I decided to try this program on a lab of 25 GX620s with SATA drives and broadcom 57xx gigabit NICs. I'm not sure why, but when I start a group of machines the transfer process goes along at a fast pace (~75Mb). However, the process always seems to fail at different places during the transfer, usually at about 800MB to 1.3GB of data. Sometimes it will recover and start going again, but usually it just stops and all the clients are dropped. I used udp-sender.exe on a Windows machine to transfer a GZIP'd image created with G4U. I know the image is good, because I routinely use it to unicast single PCs. On the target machines, I used the cast-o-matic tool and selected all the SATA and NIC modules with Automatic detection. The machines get an IP address and /dev/sda is detected Also, I verified IGMP snooping is enabled on the switch.
I have tried limiting the --max-bitrate to 40M. I'm running in 100Mbit mode --half-duplex (that's how the Summit 400 switch is setup). I've tried using the option on cast-o-matic to force IGMPv2 mode, because I'm not sure if our switch could be the issue. I also tried the udp-sender program from Ubuntu (was the version from the default repositories.. might be old). It had the same problem as the Win32 version. Although, the console had a lot more errors than the windows version... I would get streams of Timeout notAnswered notReady, etc messages in the console when the process would halt. I've also tried setting the SATA mode in the BIOS to Combination.
Anyone encountered this problem before or have a suggestion? I'd really like to use this program, because it seems perfect for my purposes (imaging labs).
Thanks for any help or advise, Jonathan Miller