[Dnsmasq-discuss] tftp service

Andrew Elwell andrew.elwell at gmail.com
Fri May 28 11:22:53 BST 2010


> PXE supports it, for netbooting clusters of 100s or 1000s of machines.
> I've never come across anybody who actually uses it. Big clusters these
> days tend to have fast networks that laugh off the traffic involved in
> unicasting netboot images to a few thousand machines.

You tend to get hit by timeouts on the server with booting multiple
machines at once - we found about 1/2 a rack at a time was the best we
could get. (but the cluster head node also acted as the kickstart
server so traffic got kinda busy come upgrades)

Switching to gPXE / gpxelinux and using http rather than tftp for
transferring the boot image was a much better improvement than trying
to sync and multicast

another nice scalable installer is to use bittorrent - see the Rocks
'Avalanche' installer
(on the other hand, reimaging a callcentre at once using norton ghost
+ multicast was waaay cool when I did it oooh 10 yrs ago)

Andrew



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