Ghost Solution Suite

Grateful if someone knowledgable could answer the following.

In our deployment schenario we currently have 7500 machines on Domain1, spread across multiple vlans, and Ghost Solution Suite installed on various servers on Domain2. The VLANs for these domains are to be merged so that all machines on domain1 will be able to see the servers on Domain2. At some point after, the Domain1 workstations will be re-imaged from Domain2 with Domain2 image.

Question:

If SMS on Domain1 is used to push down the GSS Client before VLAN consolidation, will the client carry on broadcasting attempting to connect to a GSS server until the VLAN consolidation occurs or is there some time limit at which point it will give up trying?. If there is a time is it configurable?

The GSS clients use a number of strategies to find servers, which are applied in this approximate sequence (depending on the exact version):

  - If it has seen a server before, it attempts to query it using a unicast packet to the last IP address it remembered
  - If that does not yield a result, or no previous IP is known, It attempts to locate the server by issuing a query to a well-known multicast IP address
  - If that does not yield a result, it also attempts to locate the sever using a WINS (also known as NetBIOS Name Service) query for the name of the server, and if that results in an IP it then challenges the server directly

Of all these location methods, it's only the last that potentially uses broadcast, since the WINS/NBNS protocols use that as a fallback for workgroups where there is no WINS server present. If the client machines have a WINS server IP configured for a network (either statically or by DHCP) then NetBIOS name query traffic is sent unicast to that IP instead of being broadcast.

The client issues these location queries initially 20 seconds apart, and that frequency is backed off when no replies are received to once every three minutes, so the traffic load on a gigabit network for this is fairly inconsequential, especially if a WINS server is configured so that no broadcast NetBIOS traffic is ever generated.

Thankyou, for the extremely informative reply, however if the period beween the client being installed and the server being available is long (Say a month), would the client still connect or would it have given trying by then? 

The clients never stop looking, since there's no reason to ever stop - interactive programs generally time out as a way of asking for help, but for a background service things are different (especially since there are no user-configurable settings for the GSS console client).

There are common scenarios where this tenacity is useful; a computer could be a laptop that travels outside the corporate network for extended periods, for instance, will still come back under management within a few minutes of reconnection to the home network.