@Tom-Elliott

Great news!

I updated my server to Debian Bookworm, restarted the Fog installation, and the accent problem disappeared. Awesome!

Thanks for your help and happy new year 2026, all the best for the FOG project!

@jmeyer Myself and another form moderator (Wayne Workman) came up with the concept of a mobile fog deployment server. The concept is that you would load FOG on a portable device (laptop or mini computer) with all of the necessary items for image deployment. IMO if this was going to be a truly portable computer a laptop with the built in screen and keyboard would be a better option. If you functioning as a MSP wanted to sell an imaging service than the mini or micro computer would be a better choice.

So the concept of the mobile fog deployment server is that the portable computer would have a full fog system installed on it. To minimize setup the mobile deployment server will have its IP address assigned by the remote site’s dhcp server. In this case FOG would not be your remote’s site dhcp server but it would function as a dhcp client (more on this in a bit). The next part you need to address is how to get the pxe boot information in the remote sites dhcp environment. You will do that with dnsmasq configured in a proxy dhcp mode (I have a tutorial on how to set this up in fog in the tutorial section). In this mode the FOG server (dnsmasq) will only provide pxe boot details leaving the remote site’s dhcp server untouched. With this configuration once the mobile fog server is removed from the site no pxe booting information is left behind to cause the remote site’s issues.

The issue you will have is that because FOG’s configuration is intended to be static, having the fog server’s IP address being assigned by dhcp will cause the FOG server to fail to pxe boot, to fix that issue Wayne created a script to automatically update the statically defined fields in FOG to make the IP addresses a bit more dynamic (note this is a fog server issue and has nothing to do with the target network or computers) That script is here: https://github.com/FOGProject/fog-community-scripts/tree/master/MakeFogMobile Looking at it that script is 8 years old, I can’t speak to the suitability of that script with the current version of FOG. It may need to be tweaked, but that’s the beauty of opensource software, if it doesn’t do what you need, you can fix it yourself.

It is possible to create a mobile fog deployment server, and back in the day the one I used worked great. So it is possible to do with little effort.

@djgalloway said in The DDP package file was not found or could not be read:

The DDP package file was not found or could not be read. Entering Safe Mode

This specific issue is the default fog kernel doesn’t contain the required firmware that is required to communicate with your E810 network adapter.

If I built a custom fog kernel for you in the past you already know this, but for the folks that find this post in the future… The fog developers in an effort to make a super fast imaging engine designed it using the 90/10 rule in that they will build a kernel for 90% of the deployments (which mean desktop computers) and leaving the rest for one-off builds. The supermicro servers or servers in general are in a different class than desktop/workstation computers. The desktop/workstation computers are pretty much the same even from different vendors. So the 90% rule has almost all of the hardware drivers built into the kernel. Servers class computers on the other hand have specialty components to aid in redundancy, performance, or monitoring (that other 10%) that are not typically found in the workstation class computers. Natively supporting that remaining 10% means almost doubling the size of the FOS engine kernel as well as having an impact on imaging speed. That is why the native FOS kernel doesn’t have every hardware driver built in. In your case the Intel E810 is a server class network adapter with QSFP28 ports (not something typically found in a workstation class computer).

With that said, I’m sure either the FOG kernel developers or I can create a one-off kernel for you. I will need to resetup my development environment because I just built a new linux server and haven’t move the files over from my old server, so it may take me a day or so to be in the position to create a current kernel with the required firmware built in for the nic.