Multicast support

[astronomy]

While your time estimations all sound about right, except for the full network estimation of 2.5min, I'm a bit confused on how the speed measurements work. Here are my recent findings (my speeds are recorded from what I observe in the network monitor as I experiment). My project is for 11,000 identical machines from IBM's factories. Brand new SurePOS 4800-743's. Broadcom BCM5755.

I get 23.5MB/s out of the server when I boot a single bench at a time (18 machines) that's wired with a Cisco Catalyst 2950 (takes about 15-20sec for them all). For the same bench with the Cisco switch swapped out for a Symbol ES-3000-PWR (24 x 10/100Mbps and 2 x 10/100/1000Mbps) I see up to 175MB/s out of the server (they boot before I can even get over to them) so obviously having that gigabit link to the bench switch is significant.

My lab at home consists of 1 x Netgear ProSafe 8port Gigabit Switch, 2 target machines, and the server (wireshark from server) and I can reach 23.5MB/s with 1 machine booting over 10/100 (undionly.kkpxe or ipxe.pxe). Undionly breaks down with gigabit connectivity, only pulls around 1MB/s where if I switch to the full ipxe it transfers in a little over a second. If I connect my laptop and initiate 100 connections to download the file over http I get 234MB/s out of the server. My "anomaly" machines (the ones who drag the entire network) do not exhibit the same behavior at home (it's worth noting that they drag down every aspect of the network, tftp is slow, dhcp response times are slow... 10x slower at least...).

Last Friday I had a batch of 100 up with no anomalies present (I replaced them) and did some testing of full simultaneous booting. It took over 10 minutes to deliver the data to all machines (with a few inconsistencies, 10 or so lagged quite a ways behind the rest). The server stayed around 75MB/s the entire time and CPU activity and Disk Activity were about on par with idle.

I'm fairly certain my issues stem from my inexperience with networking. I have 2 "anomalies" from my batch of 100 this morning that I'm going to isolate on another test network for further testing. I'm going to attempt learning how to setup trunking which those cisco 2950's do support (though I have no fiber cable, switches, or experience so I'm limited to using the 24 x 10/100 ports). I'd also wondered if setting up a VLAN per table may be a good idea, but I'm not sure if that's going to help. I will consider attempting adding more NIC's to the server eventually (which is entirely possible, plenty of room) but I don't seem to be stressing the server at all. I've also completely abandoned the idea of using multicast tftp. I think once I've got these "anomalies" sorted out this network will be plenty sufficient (10min to boot all 100 is perfectly OK)

Edit2: Just finished some more testing, this time I disconnected every Cisco 2950 and left my two benches of Symbol ES-3000's boot up, they immediately saturated the network to 234MB/s at the server's end.so I'm going to attempt to continue adding my anomalies back in. I can only assume it's a complicated cisco feature that I'm struggling to understand (I've disabled igmp snooping, stp, snmp traps are off though it says it filters by default I have not been able to figure that out yet)...

For what it's worth, I absolutely love iPXE, thank you for the continued development and support!