Slow network speed when using IDE redirection on CD and no terminal prompt when booting into Windows 7 via SOL.

[CSwin]

Hi,

I'm pretty new to using and understanding the benefits of the vPro and AMT MEBx, so have just started to utilise some of these abilities and the demonstration manage tools in the developers centrer (such as Intel® vPro™ Platform Solution Manager and the Open MDTK).

However, I have come across 2 issue:

1. In the main, I am looking to be able to remote access a machine in order that I can re-image it. We use Ghost but cannot utilise PXE, however, the remote IDE redirection to a CD ISO image would be perfect. I can get the remote machine to boot fine from the redirected ISO, however, once the machine has booted into the Ghost WinPE environment and initiate the image trasfer (reading or writing), the transfer speed is PAINFULLY slow. What I mean by this is it lumbers along at around 60MB/s rather than 700+ MB/s. If I start the boot process from a read CD or USB drive, the trasfer rates are normal. This means that the image process take around 8 hours to complete rather than 40 mins.
2. When I boot into the Ghost WinPE client on the remote machine, I can connect to the machine using SOL and I can get to to the SAC prompt, and from there I can get to the command prompt of the remote machine. However, when I connect using SOL to Windows 7 running on the same machine I get nothing. The Intel Management Drivers are installed on the Windows 7 OS and SOL driver is installed. What am I doing wrong?

Many thanks for any help

Chris

[CSwin]

In addition to these questions, I have one more regarding text based console. Unfortunately, we can't use the full KVM as the Dell Latitude laptops I manage utilise a discrete NVidia Graphics card. However, I am still able to see very basic text based out put during start-up via SOL.

We also use a multiboot USB flash drive built using YUMI, which in-itself use syslinux. Even though this is a text based menu system which would allow me to launch various boot tools, I don't see this in the console, Instead, I see nothing and the menu times out, eventually launching the the boot system on the HDD.

Is there any way I can get to see this boot menu from YUMI?

[Alan_A_Intel]

YUMI has graphical items on the boot menu, because of this SOL is not able to output the display. You are still able to move around in the menu, but nothing will be displayed.

[CSwin]

Hi Alan,

Yes your right. I meant to update the post to knowledge the fact that YUMI actually uses a graphical menu, not a text menu. I have a feeling it wouldn't be too difficult to revert to a simple text menu for YUMI.

Many thanks in any case.

[Alan_A_Intel]

Swinster,

1. IDE-Redirection speed is limited to about 4x CDROM speed on a local network. One way of getting around this is by doing what's called a 2-stage boot.

http://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-5552 http://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-5552

Here's an excerpt from the 2-stage boot document…

"This process uses IDER to boot a very small operating system (OS) with network drivers and a boot loader (stage 1). This OS then downloads the intended tool from a nearby network share, web server, or even the remote client's local hard drive, then copies it to a RAM drive and boots to it (stage 2)."

There are a few limitations, but essentially this allows you to bypass the normal IDE-Redirection speed.

2. Getting the SAC prompt to work while inside Windows 7 is not a vPro specific problem. For something like this you will need to contact Microsoft support.

[CSwin]

It not the redirection process I'm worrying about, it more about what happens AFTER the boot process has finished.

The Ghost Boot ISO is based on Windows PE and create a virtual RAM drive during installation where the WinPE file and Ghost is installed to. This means that the Ghost client is running entirely from RAM. In fact after the boot process has finished, I can disable IDE-r completely and the system will continue to function with no issue.

The problem that I am having issues with is the data transfer within the Ghost process. However, I have just run a IDE-r on a machine across a WAN (yes!) link and I''m getting exactly the same data transfer rate as I was getting when I booted from the same ISO either via a directly attached USB or real CD. This is 4/5 time faster (200-300MB/s) than I am seeing on machines on the LAN, which still lumber along at 60MB/s.

The ISO is the same being delivered from the same server - it even the same as the one use to create a real Boot CD or USB. The laptops are the same specification and hardware/firmware/BIOS levels in both locations.

So why am I seeing this oddity?

[Alan_A_Intel]

When you do an IDE-Redirection the LAN link speed negotiates a 100MB/s connection. The reason you're seeing this after IDE-R has completed, is because the LAN link speed does not renegotiate. For this to happen you will need to manually renegotiate the connection. Using Netsh or DevCon to disable and then re-enable the NIC should do the trick.

WiFi acts a little differently and is able to renegotiate the link speed.

[CSwin]

Hmm, I don't think this is the issue either - but I might have confused the issue slightly by supplying the wrong units of measure - they should be MB/min, not MB/sec.

So, a standard 100Mb/s connection "should" theoretically be capable to transmitting 12.5 MBytes/sec (100/8), so this equates to 750MB/min (12.5 * 60) - correct?

In theory, 1Gb/s connection could transmit 125MB/s, or 7500MB/min

Both are unlikely to see these speeds, but both should be significantly higher than the 60MB/min I am seeing after booting from a IDE-r ISO. This is more like a 10Mb/s connection.

To test you theory of disabling the Interface, I tried this on a test machine across living across room. However, I have run into a couple of issues. The Ghost boot ISO is a WinPE environment (based in Windows 2003). Whilst NETSH is available, DevCom is not so would need to be added to the image. However, running the command

netsh interface set interface "Local Area Connection" DISABLED

resulted in a

No More Data Available

The connection name is correct after running:NetSh Interface IPv4 Show Interfaces

This erorr (apparently) means that I don't have the correct permissions to run the command as it need to be run in an elevated prompt. I don't understand this as I'm running in WinPE - what other users are there - and there isn't even a RunAs command available.

Still, as the test machine is across the room, I thought just pull the LAN cable and reconnect. It is however, difficult to tell what Windows has negotiated with regards to Speed/Duplex on an Ethernet connection from the command line.

I have just started another transfer and the speed is still down at 60MB/min. So either pulling the cable and reconnecting didn't re-negotiate the connection as I would have thought, or the connection is still forced to 10Mb/sec, so how can this be overcoming give the above problems?

However, why on earth does the remote machine across the WAN link (which is booting from the very same IDE-r ISO) start transferring at the same speed I saw when boot from a real CD based on the ISO (i.e. 2-300MB/Min) ???? Its all the same hardware, and the same ISO in have cases. I'm a little confounded and confused

As an aside - why on earth does it take 24 hours to get a post to go live on this forum?

[Alan_A_Intel]

I apologize, I actually meant to say that during IDE-R the connection speed is set to 10Mb/s...I'm not sure what I was thinking.

While running in WinPE you are using the LocalSystem account, so there shouldn't be an issue with rights. As for pulling the cable, this should have changed the connection speed, as long as SOL, IDE-R or KVM had been disabled first.

[CSwin]

This posting delay is really annoying. I'm not sure where I have posted a reply or not now, and the steps I was going to perform in order to further test this. How many post to you have to complete before the "moderation" is dropped?

However, I have now added the lines:

netsh interface set interface "Local Area Connection" DISABLED

netsh interface set interface "Local Area Connection" ENABLED

into the "start.bat" file in the Ghost boot ISO. However, given my comment above, I don't think this is going to work as it appeared to result in a error.

Even if a SOL/KVN/Redirection session is active, surely disconnected the physical Ethernet cable would disrupt this session?

Of course, the ultimate goal is to to this remotely, hence disconnecting and reconnecting an Ethernet cable isn't really an option. If the above line DON'T work, I'm not sure what else I could do?

Chris

[CSwin]

Ok, (again excuse the possible out of sequence posting due to this silly system)

I have now tried the 2 boot process as outlined above. I can get this to work and indeed the boot to the WinPE image is a lot quicker. However, during the Ghost transfer, the data throughput is still only at 60MB/min.

Any other ideas?

[Alan_A_Intel]

Swinster,

I would suggest trying both 2-stage boot and RIL (Remote ISO Launcher). 2-stage and RIL work together to get around the link speed problem. During the 2-stage process, 2-stage tells RIL (via SOL) to disconnect for 10 seconds. Then 2-stage downs the eth0 and then brings it back up (hopefully at 1Gb/s speed). After the 10 seconds is up, RIL reconnects SOL.

2-Stage: https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=20960 https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=20960

RIL: https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=20961 https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=20961

[CSwin]

Hey Alan,

Yeah, I had tried the 2 stage boot that over the weekend, but didn't reply as I wasn't sure were I had actually got to on the forum!!!

I actually had mixed results. Sometimes the resultant data transfer was OK, sometimes it wasn't. The only way that I have been able to get some kind of repeatability was to run a remote reboot into BIOS, make a change, save and exit, then immediately run a remote reboot into IDE-r. All a bit clumsy, and I'm not even sure if this is an absolute answer

I will now look at the RIL side of things.

Many thanks thus far.

[CSwin]

In addition, in the 2-stage boot there seem to be a small bug in the ISO creation. If the Share password start with a special character (e.g. and '@' symbol, but also others) it is ignored and hence permission to the share is denied. Typing the password at the SOL prompt is OK.

WRT the RIL, am I correct in thinking that I HAVE to create a 2 stage boot ISO that REQUIRES manual intervention? It seem that If I try and launch an 2-stage boot ISO that simply points to a second ISO on a web server, the system doesn't boot as expected?

[Alan_A_Intel]

No, you are able to use RIL to boot a 2-stage ISO that will then automatically launch the second ISO. RIL doesn't create any abnormal boot conditions that would cause the second ISO to load incorrectly.

[CSwin]

This is difficult to keep up to date with posts but essetially the lines:

netsh interface set interface "Local Area Connection" DISABLED

netsh interface set interface "Local Area Connection" ENABLED

the start.bat file in the Ghost boot ISO don't work, returning the same error:

No more data is available

I'm not entirely sure what else I can try? However, my main quere is:

Why does the remote machine that boots from the same IDE-r ISO actually connect and send/receive info in the Ghost session that is beyond a 10Mb/sec connection (i.e. the data rate is 200-300 MB/min)?

Apologies if the with this delayed posting, the post order make no sense!!!