Multicasting w/PE_2: SymantecGhost -Help!

[Socky]

Hello All,

This post may be out of place because it may have nothing to do with WinPE. However, I'm sure people using PE for Ghost deployment have run into a similar situation as mine. Any help is appreciated:

I'm having trouble getting multicast to work with Symantec Ghost 11.

CLIENT:

I boot to PE 2.0 (stock wim with Ghost32.exe added), run ghost32.exe, select multicast, enter session name, choose automatic ip detection and yes to overwrite...

Server:

Running Server2003 with DHCP scope of 192.168.0.1-192.168.0.50 enabled.

Ghost server 11 -default settings running and accepting clients. I can see computers join the session but when i click send, the multicast hangs.

Has anybody had this problem? Could this be an issue with my switch? is there a multicasting setting on most switches? I don't deal with switches, routers or telephones so wouldn't know these answers. Should i have the multicast range entered as a scope on my server box?

anything would be great. thanks in advance.

[IcemanND]

multicasting could be blocked at the router/switch depending upon your network hardware/configuration. If you have a cheap dummy hub or switch hook a couple machines and your server to it and see if it works if it does talk to your networking department and see if they will change the switch to allow multicasting.

[bj-kaiser]

I have never dealt with Ghost, but I would think the server opens a connection to the client when multicasting, right?

and now we take the by default enabled firewall of Windows PE 2.0 in that scheme ...

maybe this is the reason ghost won't work?

try 'wpeutil disablefirewall' on your Win PE session.

[p4ntb0y]

Multicasting winpe 2 now thats a great idea!

[Socky]

IcemaND,

Thanks for the input. I will fire up a Hub tomorrow to see if that may be the source of my trouble. will report my results.

bj-kaiser,

I will try your suggestion as well, but i have a question:

If your suggestion is the case (disabling the firewall), I will need it disabled each time i Boot a PC to WinPE. I will need a way to disable the firewall by default.

In PE 1, there was a /nowf switch required prior to compilation. Is there such a thing with winpe2 or should i add a line to PE2's startup script?

Thanks in adavnce.

[bj-kaiser]

look in the documentation of the waik regarding 'winpeshl.ini'

just use something like this in the system32\winpeshl.ini

[LaunchApps]
"wpeutil /disablefirewall"
"cmd"

if you add other commands as well, make sure you have the shell (be it cmd.exe or litestep for me) as last entry, otherwise WinPE will just reboot if the last application exits.

[Rischip]

I have run into problems multicasting with Ghost and PE before as well (I have never got it to work). It has nothing to do with the server, or the network, or the firewall. I think it has something to do with the way the nic drivers are implemented in PE.

[Jazkal]

I'm not 100% sure on this, so take it with a grain of salt....

But I thought WinPE had restrictions for incoming connections (meaning you can make any).

[rcronk]

I am seeing similar problems with multicasting using RapiDeploy (a similar product to Ghost). In WinPE 1.6 it works fine. In WinPE 2.x the peers in the multicast session see a few packets, but not all. The session ends up defaulting back to unicast and that works. I will look into the firewall disabling mentioned above since there's not much else to do at this point.

One other test I thought of dealt with NIC drivers in WinPE. Does anyone know if the NIC drivers fir WinPE 2.x are compatible with the NIC drivers for WinPE 1.6? Could I drop a WinPE 1.6 driver into a WinPE 2.1 environment to see if the problem is in the WinPE 2.1 driver?

If I find anything out, I'll post my findings in this thread.

[zorphnog]

WinPE 2.x is based off of the vista kernel, so I don't know that drivers from 1.6 (2003/XP) will work.

[pretender69]

try launching ghost with the switches -ws- -wd-

example: ghost -ws- -wd-

disables caching..

might solve your hanging problems

[Stratuscaster]

It could also be your switch. We've been trying to get Multicasting working on our Cisco 7600/4500 setup for some time now - the downloads start but then hang and stop.

Our old Cisco 5500 setup would work - kind of. It wound up always defaulting to broadcasting due to lack of IGMP.

[Atheros]

Yeah. make sure that you are using vista drivers for the netowrking and are the latest up to date ones.

i had a similar issue with foxconn 946GZ's with marvell lan.

this was down to the mainboard/lan controller that caused the hanging. i ahve since not been able to fix it and it only applied to this mainboard.