![]() I wouldn't jump in to do this type of network redesign though as it's a lot of work and you need a fair amount of networking knowledge to do it properly and not give yourself more issues. Netbooting/PXEBooting and a lot of other devices and types of traffic broadcast across the network a lot and can put a lot of load on switch CPUs. There was a school I did work for that had around 500 computers and 300 Macs and even the Windows computers had real problems with PXEBooting for imaging until I subnetted the network so each building had their own subnet meaning a smaller broadcast zone. If you have a spare switch you can try or one you can temporarily swap it with for troubleshooting then I'd do that, more information/data you can get the better especially if you have to RMA the Macs because they are faulty but only for netbooting.Īlso subnetting the network so it's not one giant flat IP space and broadcast zone helps too. What is the model and brand of the switch? I've had these types of issues on cheap not very good ones and the problems go away after replacing them with better ones. Even if 2 people go around to all 20 computers netbooting them as fast as we can, the rest will eventually start imaging except for those.Īll 6 do go back to the same switch so we can try moving interfaces around, but that begs the question then why the 4 other computers also going back to the same switch would work fine!Ĭould be something wrong with the ports on the switch or the switch itself. These computers should all be identical, and they're all on the same OS, they're actually all running off a clean image right now but for some reason those 6 refuse to work automatically. But that doesn't happen on all the computers. We had also looked into the possibility of DHCP lease time conflicts because occasionally one of the failed computers would have a duplicate IP address error when it booted back to the desktop, but that's because by default they're set to assign static IP addresses, and other computers may have already gotten it. Doesn't matter if the rest of the lab is going, or if we have everything off besides the one computer we're attempting to do. We were thinking something similar however we think its something other than that because it seems to be the same 6 computers refusing to netboot. ![]() That's actually a rather typical problem, I always stagger my Macs when netbooting.Ĭheck your disk utilization when netbooting the lab all at once, it could be the server disk performance that's the issue and not the network. Our Netboot protocol is NFS, all the forums we've looked at had people struggling with an AFP limit, but theirs was usually around 40 or 50 computers limit. So just to be clear our current problem is NOT that the reimaging is crashing at 10, its that we can't get more than 10 to Netboot to the server before the reimaging can even start. So we tried Netbooting a few more a second time and they couldn't connect either. We thought this would solve our problem but when we attempted to Netboot all the computers at once so that DeployStudio could take over and reimage them, only 10 successfully started to reimage, the rest went back to the desktop. Switches B and C are in turn connected to 10 of the 20 computers respectively. Then there is a 2 gigabit pipe from Switch A to Switch B, and another 2 gigabit pipe from Switch A to Switch C. There's a 4 gigabit pipe from the imaging server to Switch A. There are 20 lab computers, and 3 switches. ![]() We were running into a bandwidth issue where we'd start reimaging 6 computers at once, but on the 7th the DeployStudio instance would crash and that computer would eventually just restart. I've been helping set up a Xserve Mac imaging server in my college computer lab.
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