Feedback

[jhurd8025]

Natan, alongside some of the other thigns I brought up here is one more.


There's been alot of posts over the last year relatedf to the blinking cursor problem.

Someone will image a host using PING, when the host boots. It just shows a blink cursor.

Alot of speculation of saying its the MBR not being rebuilt right. Or the partitions created incorrectly. Yadda Yadda.


Well I've had the same problem with two server types.

ALL HP SCSI/SATA/RAID servers.

These all give the blinking cursor error. UNLESS. Unless I recreate the raid sets with large disk acess mode at 8GB instead of the 4GB default.

The same occurs on two popular Supermicro servers. These however are not raid. So I can do it in the bios, and I have to change the option. "large disk access mode" from other to dos.


Is there a way around to making these changes. These hosts work fine without the bios or raid setting changes using GHOST or Clonezilla. ANy idea on what is the problem. I guess the kernel?

[Natan]

Hi JHurd,

it's very hard for me to tell, because I don't have this kind of H/W here so to make tests. The problem might be caused by the way we clone the boot sector (copy of the first 512 bytes). Maybe it would be better to rebuild a new boot sector from scratch, or at least give users the choice to have this done.

Anyway, if your UNLESS way to do it works, it could be a good first step to have it written in the Howto's FAQ. Should we ?

Regards
Natan

[jhurd8025]

Yeah let me get the exact bios/raid config options before you put anything up.



Any chance at working on some of the other items. They shouldnt be that hard..


As far as getting past having a c0d0,hda,sda for each image type.

Can't you just throw in some conditional logic that says if PING detects sda, then look for sda files. If PING detects hda, then look for hda files.

I think this would be easier than the text file isntructions you mentioned.

I would try to work on this, but just need to know where to start.


Also the drive size function would be cool tool. I see it as having a prompt to ask you what size primary partition you want, then it simply uses the part file, mounts to it, and edits the file.. afterwards the typical fdisk function is run??

[Natan]

It's a way, but we must also keep it simple, and backward-compatible.

In the future, PING should be able to write a new boot sector from scratch, create partitions itself (rather than dd-ying a 512-byte file with the beginning of a device), and then restore their content. All this, optionally -- by default, byte-to-byte copy should remain the usual way.

Regards
Natan

[jhurd8025]

so when we getting started?

[Natan]

That's the real point

[DwayneM]

Natan,
First of all I would like to say great program! Ghost cant touch it. I have successfully imaged over 650 computers with little to no problem. My company builds specialized touch screen computers and I run the repair shop. I use PING instead of a replicator to reimage the repaired units. I also image Dell 620's and 755's for as a server application without any issues. I have never been able to do that with any other imaging program.

Kudos to you and if ever you need anything done or tested just let me know.

[annihilator89]

First I must say ping works great, but I have an idea.
Since most linux distros for example "Ubuntu" can identify most Hardware devices, can you load the CD version of ping with lots of drivers (more so than the PXE kernel?

[Natan]

Hi Anihilator,

When just booting a CD, it would be interesting. But many people here use PXE to launch PING, and everything is therefore stored in memory. Another way would be of course to grab drivers from the network, but this still means the kernel has to identify the NIC, with... already loaded drivers.

It seems better to keep PING small (20 MB !), especially if we consider that only NICs and controllers have to be handled. A well-compiled kernel with a few modules (the ones that have not been integrated into the kernel yet for whatever reason) should suits most usual needs. But last-shipped PING kernel was not so well compiled

Regards
Natan

[DwayneM]

Natan, I have been using PING for about 9 months now. I have just hit a milestone of my 800th computer imaged using PING. The failure rate is less than 1%. Those units were reimaged and came up just fine. Great tool! Also, with some people getting high transfer rates, lets see if we can get some people to post their hardware configs. That way the people not getting those rates can change their hardware to get there. I personally can only get a max of 600mb. Once again great tool!

[ken]

Natan,

Any chance of future PING versions adding:

1. An option in the ping.conf file to skip the local or network question for the location of the image files. I still like the option to select which local location since it may vary but it definitely is not on the network. It seems the only option now is to list all the possible local locations in the ping.conf file.

2. Like everyone, I occasionally hit enter on some page with the wrong selection and get stuck. Would it be possible to have buttons at the page bottom labeled "continue" and "go back" so I could return to correct my error? The up and down arrows (and space bar, if needed) can still make the selections but use the right and left arrows to select "continue" or "go back" followed by "enter". The "continue" can be pre-selected to avoid extra key presses.

Thanks to this great utility, PING, I can afford to take risks on the computer.

DwayneM,

I personally can only get a max of 600mb

My best is just over 500 MiB/min.

[Natan]

Hi Ken,

Natan,

Any chance of future PING versions adding:

1. An option in the ping.conf file to skip the local or network question for the location of the image files. I still like the option to select which local location since it may vary but it definitely is not on the network. It seems the only option now is to list all the possible local locations in the ping.conf file.

Normally, you can provide network info to PING through the parameters, including info concerning the network share. In such a case, everything should go with no interactivity.

PING 2.01.19 also accepts that the "Server" entry points to a local drive. Please, give a look to the sample ping.conf file for details.

2. Like everyone, I occasionally hit enter on some page with the wrong selection and get stuck. Would it be possible to have buttons at the page bottom labeled "continue" and "go back" so I could return to correct my error? The up and down arrows (and space bar, if needed) can still make the selections but use the right and left arrows to select "continue" or "go back" followed by "enter". The "continue" can be pre-selected to avoid extra key presses.

LOL, the "go back" is not really easy to achieve, because PING is just a script (no OO inside). But I'll probably have Cancel bring the user back to the beginning.

500 MB/mn is also what I usually get on a VM. It sounds really normal, even if I must say I envy one user here who is used to getting up to 900...

Regards
Natan

[ternarybit]

Interesting tidbit:

I am beta testing Windows 7 x86 at work here, and surprisingly it greatly exceeds my expectations. I host my PING images from a USB external hard drive which is now connected to the Windows 7 machine, and I just served up a 4GB image at a steady 675MB/min, whereas serving from my usual XP Pro configuration, I get 4-500MB/min. BTW I am using the latest beta build of PING from PXE to boot from.

Just thought I'd let you know.

[Natan]

Not surprised at PING perf, but as Windows's lol
Well, that's good news. We were all expecting something better than Vista...

Regards
Natan

[mabrownmab]

FYI. Couple things in 3.00.01. When I tried to use Network share on CIFS (WinXP server) I kept having problems with getting the network path right in the "root Directory of your data" stage. At some point a Folder was created in my networked partimage folder called 'Create_New_Image'. (I think after it failed I went back into Ping by typing '/etc/{I forget the command}...' and it created the folder). After that I have had no issues when doing a network backup.

Second very minor, and I don't know how I noticed it...When you get to the stage where you hit ENTER to go into PING, the date has the year of 2008.

Loving the program. -Monte