[syslinux] Ghostcast random freeze.

[Gene Cumm]

On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 16:43, H. Peter Anvin <hpa at zytor.com> wrote:
> On 07/28/2010 02:38 PM, Hudson, Lawrence H. wrote:
>> Greetings again,
>>
>> I am experiencing a lockup when ghost casting about 1 out of 5 client machines locks up.  I don't recall if I was having this issue when I was using 3com pxe menus or not.  I was wondering if the issue I am seeing could be caused by pxelinux since it basically is loading a Linux kernel then booting a MSDos.imz file.  I cannot find any errors from the ghostcast side or the ghost error file.
>>
>
> You're not saying where or how it locks up.
>
>        -hpa
>

Yep.  I've seen where mice mess it up where everything seems to load
and then you get the Ghost screen to come up and it stops dead under
the following two conditions (independent of how you load things):

1) The mouse is bad and messing up the mouse controller.

2) You might have a USB-based mouse/keyboard, a 3com card like the
3c905 and have not assigned a dedicated IRQ to the NIC.  The DOS
driver Symantec was using at one point for the 3c905 required the
dedicated IRQ to work properly.

I've also seen where in the middle of a ghostcast session, a client
hangs and is dropped from the session due to a bad NIC driver (always
at the exact same block in the image).  Try fetching an updated NIC
driver from Symantec or the hardware vendor.

An extension to hpa's statement: What hardware (preferably with
BIOS/firmware versions; examples of where it does and doesn't work)?

Your issue could also be network-born, most likely with dropped
packets if it's network-born (bad NICs, saturating a link, etc).  Have
you tried in very small batches (2-5) and build up to larger batches?

Have you tried repeating the ghostcast with very small batches of
problematic PCs (like 1-3 "failures", possibly with 1-3 "successes")?

-- 
-Gene