Of course it does not work if you try to use gzip to decompress lzop compressed data (and vice-versa). These are two different compression schemes, and should not be mixed.

If you consistently use lzop it works. If you consistently use gzip it also works.

Well I obviously wasnt mixing them. Im no bigginer in unix-like env to not know gzip and lzop are different schemes. I was obviously not understood. I'll try to explain it better: The imaging server runs Gentoo Linux, ive installed udpcast-20050208 on it. I booted the machine on which I maintain the image using PXE, firstly chose gzip as my compression format of choice (ive been using udpcast for over a year, but unfortunatly my old initrd got lost in the process of upgrading), therefore ive started udp-sender, with gzip on that pc. On the gentoo server i started udp-receiver. The image was saved no problem, then i booted another 20 pcs on which i started udp-receiver via as well PXE, and gzip decompression. and on the server udp-sender. Imaging worked, but afterwards only NTFS partitions were readable, but none of the linux partitions.

Then i tried lzop, knowing it is much faster than gzip, saving the image on the server worked fine, but when i tried to ghost a machine with it spat out an error (after about 200 000MB of compressed data was sent across the client ) which i cant remember now but basically it would not continue ghosting.

Then i tried uncompressed format, took ages, but when it was saved on the server, i manually ran gzip and lzop on it and tested both(created extra two files, one .gz and one .lzo), sent them across to the client on which I chose either lzop or gzip (depending which file of the 2 i was sending) and it worked perfectly. therefore there doesnt seem to be a problem with udp-receiver but udp-sender that is compressing the data before it sends it over the network to the Gentoo server.

The machines are perfectly identical.