Slow Win7 boot

[mshoemaker]

I have been searching and searching to find a cause for this but I am not finding anything, so I figured I would seek out some assistance.

I have two machines, one running Windows Server 2008 that is running the iSCSI initiator, dhcp server, and tftp server, and stores the drive image for the diskless client. The next machine is diskless, but uses ipxe to connect to the server and connect to the iSCSI drive. The process works, however it takes 2 minutes plus or minus 2 seconds, from the time I get the starting sanboot message, until the windows logon screen comes up.

I put wireshark on the server and logged while I started the diskless machine. I see the traffic start when ipxe gets its IP address from the DCHP server and traffic continues until the Windows logo appears on the screen. At this point all the traffic just stops.

Looking at the wireshark log, traffic is flowing for 20 seconds, then stops. The next message is at 43 seconds from the server to the client NOP IN, followed by 4 retransmits. Then at 49, 50, 51, 122, 123, 124, 125 seconds there are ARP requests asking about the clients IP address, then at 125.5 there is an iSCSI login command, then the next 20 seconds are a flurry of message traffic.

I just wondered what I should look for as to a cause of this 105 second delay with no traffic?

Thanks,
Matthew

[mcb30]

(2016-01-28 21:50)mshoemaker Wrote:  Looking at the wireshark log, traffic is flowing for 20 seconds, then stops. The next message is at 43 seconds from the server to the client NOP IN, followed by 4 retransmits. Then at 49, 50, 51, 122, 123, 124, 125 seconds there are ARP requests asking about the clients IP address, then at 125.5 there is an iSCSI login command, then the next 20 seconds are a flurry of message traffic.

I just wondered what I should look for as to a cause of this 105 second delay with no traffic?

It sounds as though the iPXE portion has completed after 20 seconds, then the Windows kernel starts up, and finally the Windows iSCSI initiator starts up at 125.5 seconds. You can verify this by looking at the "initiator task tag" (ITT) in the iSCSI requests: any requests from iPXE will have the first two bytes of the ITT set to 0x18ae.

If this is the case, then it's a Windows problem rather than an iPXE problem. You could try enabling Windows kernel debugging and attaching windbg to find out what the Windows kernel is doing during this time.

Michael

[mshoemaker]

OK, thanks.

Matthew