| When I use Clonezilla server edition to do a multicast clone, the client machines just keep waiting, any hint ? |
Normally you can find the clues in the log files (/var/log/messages or /var/log/daemon.log) about udpcast in your DRBL server. Try to find the keyword "udpcast" in the log files to see the status and why it won't start.
Basically there are some possibilities, and some hints about this issue:
- The network switch has blocked multicast packets. In this case, you have to enable that in your network switch, or check the "-brdcst" in the advanced parameters when you start multicast clonezilla. Thanks to Jean-Philippe Menil for providing this hint about how to check your network switch for multicast function. On the other hand, an unmanaged network switch is another good choice in this case.
- There are more than one network switches in your DRBL environment, and you did not link those switches with cables. If not, do that.
- Your server has more than one network interface and the interface that DRBL has choosen for multicast (udpcast) traffic is not the one you need (eg. eth0 instead of eth1). You can point this in your /var/log files looking for 'udpcast'. It should say something like : udpcast[29960]: Starting transfer: file[] pipe[] port[2232] if[eth0] participants[3].
You can also point this with a 'ps | grep udp-sender' command that will show the interface used by udp-sender process. It should says something like : udp-sender --full-duplex --min-clients 3 --max-wait 300 --interface eth0 --nokbd --mcast-all-addr 224.0.0.1 --portbase 2232 --ttl 1
To fix this, edit your drbl-ocs.conf file (/etc/drbl/drbl-ocs.conf) and add a this new variable : eth_for_multicast="eth1" (if eth1 is the interface you need drbl to use).
- You assign the number of clients, but maybe some of them fail to join the multicast clone due to some reason, say, the hardware problem. Check your clients to see if all of them in the same status.
- Make sure your firewall in the DRBL server does NOT block the multicast packets.
- Some buggy network driver for NIC on your server might cause this problem. Try to compile the latest driver or use the latest GNU/Linux as your DRBL server might avoid this problem.
- Make sure you do not create a shortcut to run "dcs", since there are some background programs need to be run, if you use shortcut to run dcs, when dcs is done, the shortcut is finished, and all other background programs will be killed, too. Therefore multicast clone won't work. It's recommended to run dcs in a terminal, If you really want to use shortcut for dcs, remember to check "run in terminal" option when you create such a shortcut.
- Try diffrent kernels both for your Clonzilla SE server and cllients if you can. E.g. Mark Sargent mentioned that his server is running the kernel "Linux Ubuntu 2.6.24-24-Server #1 SMP i686 GNU/Linux" from Ubuntu 8.04, and it was not working very well with multicast clone. After he upgraded the whole system to Ubuntu 8.10 with newer kernel, it's working.
- Make sure the power supply for the machines is powerful enough. Thanks to labiauf for sharing this. For more info, please check this discussion.
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