[selowitch]

I'm a diehard Mac user who is forced to administer a small Windows network at work (yeech!). I've got a hybrid wired/wireless network of including three clients using 802.11g wireless PCI cards. We use Norton Ghost for backup, and I've noticed that the backups consistently fail on the wireless connections and generally work fine on the wired ones. Our signal strength is excellent, and we just got the new Linksys WRT54GX router so I don't think our hardware per se is the issue.

What I'm deathly afraid of is finding some obscure Norton/Symantec technical note that says, "Oh, yeah ... btw, Ghost won't work on wireless networks." Then I'd be totally screwed. I thought that wireless was supposed to be identical to the IPv4 standard, albeit slower and less reliable. The software shouldn't know the difference ... should it?

[larkost]

A lot of wireless networking devices don't pass many broadcast packets, and it might be the that is how ghost finds the server. I have never actually used ghost, but that would make sense. It might work if you could set a manual IP address for the server.

[ghporter]

I think Ghost WANTS a wired connection. It likes to use a lot of bandwidth while it's writing, and I think anything that even temporarily reduces that bandwidth looks like a bad connection to Ghost, so it gives up. I've used both Ghost and DriveImage, and DriveImage is much more tolerant of less than optimum network connections. I once had to back up a (I'm not making this up) 80386SX laptop using a parallel port network adapter. DriveImage handled it quite well. On the other hand, I've seen Ghost choke while restoring from a slow CD-ROM drive.

Now that Symantec's bought PowerQuest, it remains to be seen whether they'll incorporate the best bits of both Ghost and DriveImage, or just can the competition. I'm keeping the latest version of DI, just in case.

[selowitch]

Originally posted by larkost:
A lot of wireless networking devices don't pass many broadcast packets, and it might be the that is how ghost finds the server. I have never actually used ghost, but that would make sense. It might work if you could set a manual IP address for the server.

Erm, I don't have a server. It's strictly peer-to-peer at this point. I'm using fixed local IP addresses (and DHCP for the "external" WAN IP). Maybe the problem is my Linksys NSLU2 Network Storage Link. It's possible the wireless connection in concert with that slow bridge to the backup drive is what's making Norton, uh ... give up the Ghost, so to speak. LOL.

[ghporter]

I think Ghost WANTS a wired connection. It likes to use a lot of bandwidth while it's writing, and I think anything that even temporarily reduces that bandwidth looks like a bad connection to Ghost, so it gives up. I've used both Ghost and DriveImage, and DriveImage is much more tolerant of less than optimum network connections. I once had to back up a (I'm not making this up) 80386SX laptop using a parallel port network adapter. DriveImage handled it quite well. On the other hand, I've seen Ghost choke while restoring from a slow CD-ROM drive.

Now that Symantec's bought PowerQuest, it remains to be seen whether they'll incorporate the best bits of both Ghost and DriveImage, or just can the competition. I'm keeping the latest version of DI, just in case.

[selowitch]

What about tweaking the advanced settings on the wireless 802.11g PCI cards? Might that improve things?