[c-nsp] tftp woes

[Peter Hicks]

On Sun, 2011-07-24 at 21:43 -0500, Dan Letkeman wrote:

> After about 12-15 machines start the image transfer the server gets
> over utilized and the tftp download from the server starts to take a
> lot longer on the rest of the machines that need to download the
> imaging software, not the image itself.  Is there a simple way on
> these switches to prioritize the tftp traffic over the actual image
> transfer?  Possibly some simple QOS commands?

tftp is UDP-based, have you checked the whole network to make sure you
don't have a duff link producing errors and dropping UDP packets?  Are
you suffering over-utilization at any point?

Is the initial software download happening in a machine's PXE
environment?  If so, the timeout for tftp packets may be a lot larger
than you expect, hence a single packet being dropped equates a much
larger impact.

Have you looked at a multicast-based solution for imaging the machines?


Peter

-- 
Peter Hicks <peter.hicks at poggs.co.uk>