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On 26 Feb 2006 at 19:26, Benjamin Moore wrote:

Date sent: Sun, 26 Feb 2006 19:26:47 -0800 From: Benjamin Moore bmoore@tacticallanguage.com To: udpcast@udpcast.linux.lu Subject: [Udpcast] Lots of Timeouts using udpcast

Hello,

I've just recently(as in the last hour) started playing with udpcast to image a bunch of Windows XP machines.

I seem to have gotten everything working, but the throughput is kind of slow because of the large number of time out errors I am getting.

This is the error: Timeout notAnswered=[0,1] notReady=[0,1] nrAns=0 nrRead=0 nrPart=2 avg=<now hovering around 59k>

Some questions about the setup. Is it one or two machines that is giving the timeouts? I have a lab of 20 machines, one was causing this problem. If I imaged all the others together there would be very few timeouts compared to thiis one. Turned out to be the hard drive in that machine, which was the same brand as all the others. In swapping the hard drive to another machine the problem moved from the one machien to the other. Ran diagnostics on the drive,and it reports no errors, but it doesn't seem to be able to keep up with writing the sections of the drive that are blank, so the compressed informaiton is coming in faster than the machine can write it to the disk. I've seen that these drives can only do about 45MB after the buffer gets full.

Also, what IP addresses are you using on the systems. I had a problem, whereas the College MIS has 3 Class C blocks all the the same physical network with a standard Class C subnet mask (Don't ask why??), and if I used dhcp it would only work with machines on the same class C. I ended up making an ipmac.txt file for the udpcast, and had it assign 10.0.7.x numbers to my machines (Lab D-7).

Also, you could try a cross-over cable and directly connect two machines, and see if it differs from going thru the switch..

Another issue that you might want to look at, are you clearing the unused space on the drive before doing the transfer. I have a program that I use with my G4L project (at least the last four releases) and udpcast. ftp://fedoragcc.dyndns.org/blank6.exe Is a little C program (source code at the same site with .cpp), and it works for FAT and NTFS partitions. I just copy the file to the machine, and from the command prompt you blank6 c (c being the drive to clear). It just creates 2GB files full of nulls until the disk is full, and deletes them when done. This will speed up the compress and greatly reduce the time to transmitt the data. When I image my lab machines, I can get about 20+ MB/sec considering the uncompressed size of the 80GB drives.

Don't know if that help, or just confused things more. Just yesterday, I imaged the other 19 machines in my lab with 80GB drive in about 50 minutes with a hub.

One other thing that you might want to look at is the --max-bitrate= option. I've found that if I set it to 90M it reduces these timeouts for the 18 machines, and 80M will sometimes have none. With the problem machine, it usually takes 60M or lower to stop the errors.

Periodically udpcast seems to recover and the throughput goes back up. But then it starts getting Timeouts again.

THe configuration right now is 2 machines recieving and the machine transmitting all plugged into the same switch. I will be doing a second run with 20 machines tomorrow.

It looks like everything is working otherwise, so I'm just curious what's going on.

Thanks,

Ben _______________________________________________ Udpcast mailing list Udpcast@udpcast.linux.lu https://lll.lgl.lu/mailman/listinfo/udpcast

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