Accessing an SDI image from multiple targets simultaneously

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ian Firkin
  • Start date Start date
I

Ian Firkin

Hi all,

My first NG post, so please let me know if I breach etiquite.

I was wondering, is it possible to deploy the *same* image to mulitple,
identical target machines *simultaneously*, via winpe from a mapped
network drive?

i.e.,

- 20 Target machines, identical hardware;
- Each target boots from its own WinPE disk, with a local "net use,"
diskpart, etc. script;
- Each target maps a certain network share, and runs a local copy of
sdimgr to deploy an image from the share to a local disk, via
"writepart".

A couple of experiments suggest that sdimgr locks the image while
writing it to disk.

I haven't seen anything specifically regarding this, so I thought I
would ask. Am I overlooking something simple?

Are people deploying images one machine at a time, sequentially?

I should mention, that the above process works fine on one machine at a
time; it is only the question of "prepping" mulitple machines at the
same time that is giving me trouble.

I'm also not tied to using sdimgr/image.sdi; I've tried using XCOPY
with the same results, and would be open for any other suggestions as
well.

Thanks much,

Ian
 
Ian,

SDIMgr /write.... commands indeed require write access to the SDI file and lock it up (in fact, it is WriteDiskBlobToPhysicalDrive
function of sdiaut library does that underneeze).

Perhaps you may want to copy the SDI file locally on devices first (another partition?) and then expand it on the system partition
with SDIMgr.

Btw, what problems you had with xcopy approach? I have used this approach many times to deploy images simultaneously on many
machines and it worked quite well.
 
Hi KM,

Essentially, using xcopy gave me (what I thought) was a similar
problem; when multiple machines were xcopy'ing from the same share at
the same time, the last connecting machine would cause the others to
lose the connection to the network. Thinking about this again, it
seems like it might be a networking issue, rather than a file locking
one; I'll test this again, especially since it seems to have worked for
you.

Thanks much,

Ian
 
Ian,

xcopy should not lock files on network share. If you are not sure about it, just made the share read-only.

Losing network connection does sound like a networking issue. Hope you set up the share on "server" machine, not XP or etc. with
limited umber of network connections possible at a time.
 
KM,

As it turns out, it is not a locking issue at all; Apparently there is
a documented problem with copying large files over the network. The
error message is "The specified network name is no longer available."

I've been changing around NIC settings, routers, etc., but I have a
feeling from reading a bit that this might just be a Windows
issue...I've found *many* reports of similar behavior, but no clear
solution yet.

Thanks again for your help,

Ian
 
Ian,

Try to use different tools like xxcopy or robocopy.

I used robocopy a lot and never ever had networking issue with it.
 
Back
Top