ACK! NETWORK PROBLEMS!

So, the last period of the day, yesterday, I spent connecting the aforementioned second-to-last classroom up to a GhostCast session (Symantec Ghost 8.0 is what we use to image the workstations) and was having very strange problems.

First of all, the NIC link lights were all flickering the way they should, network connectivity was there. However, every other time I tried to connect to the GhostCast server it said it couldn't find the session, and to check the server to make sure it was ready to accept clients. Grrrrrrr. Drop to the A:/> prompt, autoexec, and run it again and Bam!, it would work fine this time. (Sometimes I had to drop to the A:/> prompt several times to get it to work, but it would eventually work)

I have NEVER had problems connecting to the server before, so I was a bit wary. When I tried to run the session it claimed to be in progress, but no information was being sent. I left it overnight and this morning it has simply crapped out with an error (GhostCode 19922) that might mean the wrong NIC drivers (no), might mean that the client has 2 NICs (no), that the server has more than one IP address (no), or that the file has permissions issues (no).

It's my impression that this error code is one of those vague errors that could be just about anything. It's my impression that the problem is a network switch in there. I can run Ghost fine anywhere else. I found, this morning as I've been troubleshooting to figure out what the problem really is, that when I'm imaging a machine outside of the English pod, it goes at 400 MB/s or more!

I just self-censored a lot of not-very-constructive chatter that would have gone here.

*grumble*