@cool1107cm said in Maybe the USB cable is bad:

Hi @Quazz & @fry_p

How can I add kernel argument as below,
Would you please provide me more detail info?
Thank you so much

usbcore.old_scheme_first=1
has_usb_nic=1

Hi @cool1107cm ,
Much has changed in the way of Surface imaging for me. At the time of this post, I was able to image using these kernel arguments with a USB NIC on a Surface Pro 4 . However, as time passed, a number of other variables have come out of the woodwork to prevent the use of FOG on Surface Pro’s for me. I have reverted to manually installing Windows. I believe for a while I was working with @Sebastian-Roth and/or @george1421 on getting this to work. If you have a surface pro/ usb nic issue, I would highly recommend starting a new thread. Perhaps someone has come up with a solution since the time of this post.

Sorry I couldn’t be much more help. For the record, I used the Host Kernel Argument box on the host information page for the particular host on the web GUI and added these arguments in the order I specified separated by a single space.

@falko on first glance it looks like they use Intel branded NIC’s (both wired and wireless). Any ideas for which model you are going with? Full disclosure, I am US based an know very little about Stone.

@Sebastian-Roth We were able to resolve the issue. The machine has 5 NICs. The NIC we were actually using to network boot with was registered with FOG, but for some reason FOG was reading one of the other NICs during start. After registering all 5 MACs, fog worked successfully.

Re: the HP Elite X2, yes, 2 MACs on one ethernet adapter. Adapter is HP P/N: 829834-001. The second MAC only shows up when network booting - no other time.

@himem If you find this is the case; could you provide the hardware info an a clear screen shot of the setting changes to make it work taken with a mobile phone? If you have a problem, I’m sure someone else will in the near future.

@robellet /var/www/fog is intended to be a link to /var/www/html/fog but seems like it’s not in your case. So you seem to have two versions of the web UI installed. Probably good to clean that up while you are at it. Run diff -Nur /var/www/html/fog /var/www/fog to see the differences. Post output here if you need help to sort this.

@JJ-Fullmer Ok, I just prepared a first one to test for you - download 1_bzImage and put in /var/www/html/fog/service/ipxe. Then edit this host’s settings and set this kernel as Host Kernel and see what you get.

I used a fairly recent kernel version 4.19.13 and so we might even see different behaviour than when we tested some months ago.

@Sebastian-Roth
Gr8 news. Thx a lot

Hi Sebastian,
thanks for the advice and now it works correctly FOG with this machine.

Are the disks configured in a raid configuration and the firmware is in UEFI mode? If so you are probably out of luck. There is a known condition between Linux, UEFI, Dell computers with the hard disk controller in the “raid-on” mode. Understand this is not a FOG issue (exactly), but a Linux - Intel-Raid driver issue.
If the disks are not in a raid configuration, then switching the disk controller back to ahci mode will allow you to capture and deploy using FOG.

@SDToone What errors are you seeing? A clear screen shot of the error(s) will help understand the context of the error/no function.

I wanted to stop by and say that I can concur that I was able to image the 2018 newest x1 carbon using the Lenovo Dock as well. I did not try any other means as we purchased the docks with the carbons and that seemed to be the logical choice. I apologize to @AsGF2MX for not saying this earlier to save you some hassle. Just didn’t click in my head that I recently imaged these with this method. Best of luck in your future Fogging.

@Beber55 Ok, permission error was missleading, nevermind.

You need to edit the file: nano /etc/default/tftpd-hpa

Now make the change, save (ctrl+o), exit (ctrl+x) and then run the other commands to restart and read log file as suggested earlier.

@lschnider if you are doing a golden image (one image for multiple models), then I strongly suggest doing sysprep for Windows 10. I sysprep mine from “audit mode”, which became necessary when trying to remove windows store apps from being created when a new user gets created. There are other reasons we had to go that route as well, but my memory is a bit hazy as to what we had to do. I will get to build the golden image from scratch again once the next spring update comes out.

If you aren’t doing much customizing, you may not need audit mode, but I think you need sysprep for the driver injection to work correctly (assuming you are going for a zero-touch installation).

Kernel option CONFIG_VMD added to the official repo. Will upload new 4.19.6 kernels soon.

@mckayj said in iPXE won't find network cards:

some super new network cards iPXE can’t talk to

I’m more suspicious of 10G nics than super new cards. I don’t know off the top of my head if iPXE supports 10G cards. Or it may be a combination of super new and 10G. ??

As long as you have a path forward then use it.

@jms FOS is based on buildroot. Building your own custom init is definitely possible but we don’t have a nice wiki article on this.

On the other hand it’s all available in a script. Clone a copy of the FOS repo and run the build script:

git clone https://github.com/FOGProject/fos cd fos ./build.sh -fn -a x64

Make sure you have enough of disk space available (roughly 7 GB as it downloads and compiles a huge amount of code) and lots of CPU power and RAM. On our designated compile workhorse it takes more than an hour to build. On my laptop it’s more like 8 hours.

@jdcraymond Ok, official 4.19.1 kernels with mentioned driver enabled are uploaded.

@akewl Set the disk controller from raid-on to ahci mode for imaging. Then when done switch it back and you should be all set, or leave it in ahci mode. The issue is with uefi, linux, intel disk controller, raid-on mode.

@funwithimages Ok, I got this wrong 😉

So question is where exactly does it hang - philosophical question as you probably can’t see what it is doing at that moment.

Issue appears to occur JUST when attempting to deploy an image.

Can you please register the host and then schedule a normal deploy task from the web UI, boot up the client and see if it deploys.

I posted in this section as this is the only model in my fleet affected by this issue.

Ok, got that, definitely an interesting issue if that’s true.

@msaglioc99 We have numerous people using USB network adapters to boot devices like tablets and so on. Probably some USB C adapter should work. But be aware that it needs drivers in the Dell BIOS/UEFI firmware to be able to PXE boot from a USB adapter. Easier said than done as there is usually no information about this available.

So you can either start buying different adapters and test to see which is working or you can ask Dell to tell you. If you find one there is still a big hurdle to take because PXE booting also means iPXE and Linux kernel needs to have a driver. From experience we know what more often than not drivers are available within iPXE/kernel! But we do see issues with buggy firmware from time to time that prevents from PXE booting even though.

Just for your information, it is possible but I guess you need to start trying it out and see what you get. Let us know if you get stuck at some point and we will try to help you!