Comments on: Ghost imagaing

By: dcsys99

dcsys99 — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 06:56:33 +0000

Multicast performance is based on the slowest link on the segment. A 10HD printer or the 10Mb WLAN will cause a slowdown for all 100Mb systems

By: paul144hart

paul144hart — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 10:03:40 +0000

One other thing, if you aren’t going to manage anything on the wireless net, I’d block the ghost ports at the access point to stop the traffic from being broadcast.

By: paul144hart

paul144hart — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 10:01:18 +0000

Since you noted that older machines are most affected, I would look into seeing their network adapters are operating in promiscious mode – the OS listens to all traffic. The newer machines are probably setting that by default as it is a more secure setting.

If its not, then you’ll need to look at changing the network, the idea of a VLAN that is for ghosting only sounds good if you have that ability.
-paul

By: snapper70

snapper70 — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 21:33:35 +0000

I don’t know the config commands on 3Com, but you CAN set up multicasting with a switch and router that supports the capability. What is probably happening is that, when imaging, the ENTIRE NETWORK SEGMENT is being flooded at the rate of your slowest machine being imaged. If that’s 10 Meg, then your 10 Meg machines will get next to no bandwidth.

You can either set the network up to support Multicast via CGMP or snooping; or have the imaged machines/server on their own network segment.

By: boardfish

boardfish — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 09:11:53 +0000

This is part of the problem with multicast that you don’t find in unicast. Though multicast can support imaging multiple systems at the time, because of the nature of the packets, you create a lot of network collisions and retries. This can really bog down a network segment. It’s best to do this form of imagine over a hard-wired, physically and logically separated network or controlled VLAN.

If you’re interested in getting other Ghost users perspective, you may want to cross post this to the Boardfish.com Ghost forum at:

http://www.boardfish.com/forum/forum_topics.asp?FID=14

Good luck!

Duncan McAlynn
Founder, Boardfish.com