@Sebastian-Roth Go ahead and mark it solved, I haven’t had time to test and probably won’t anytime soon. It’s that busy time of the year 🙂

@mm-Ekimia May I point you to a topic in the iPXE forum where one of the main developers was saying that “USB support is starting to arrive in mainline iPXE” only about a good year ago. They have made progress I am sure! We have seen more and more people successfully booting their devices with USB NICs on iPXE.

The biggest problem from my point of view is if you want to PXE boot from the USB NIC! Using an USB NIC with linux (as you do right now) is fairly easy because linux takes control and provides full access through own drivers. Completely different if you want to PXE boot from the USB NIC. Then your client machine - its BIOS/UEFI firmware - must be able and willing to talk to the USB NIC for PXE booting. Sounds like you don’t aim for that but just wanted to point that out!

Back to your initial question… booting iPXE via USB key - which is easier than USB NIC PXE booting but still harder than booting linux to use the USB NIC. As George already said it’s a matter of finding a USB NIC adapter that is supported by iPXE. I started a list of supported USB NICs some time ago. Unfortunately I lost track of it all as it was very hard to follow without having my own devices for testing. Maybe this is a good point to start again. Searching the forums we should be able to find a lot of information as lots of people have tried USB NICs lately, known working e.g. ASIX AX88772C…

But that’s still not the whole story I’m afraid! iPXE provides native drivers (should work both for UEFI and legacy BIOS) as well as UNDI (for BIOS) and SNP (for UEFI):

undionly.pxe, kpxe, kkpxe, usb, iso - BIOS no native drivers ipxe.pxe, … - BIOS with native drivers and UNDI interface snponly.efi, usb, iso - UEFI no native drivers ipxe.efi, … - UEFI with native drivers and SNP interface smsc95xx/intel/realtek.XXX - “single” native driver

So you might need to play with the different iPXE binaries to see which one is working for you. Please let us know which USB NIC exactly you have - make and model!!

Edit: I just updated the mentioned wiki article. Hope this is useful for a lot of people. Please keep us up to date with USB NIC adapters you try.

@Sebastian-Roth @Wayne-Workman I think an adjustable time would be nice though. Hard coding in a time might not be best for everyone, I am not a seasoned programmer but coding a field in the DB along the same lines as the FOG_SERVICE_CHECKIN_TIME to give the time a value doesn’t seem like it should be much harder. FOG_CRON_TASK_EXPIRY. Having it a global value, and not per task I think would be fine.

That way it could be set in a fashion of every night run this task, if task hasn’t been run in X min delete task. This would allow a task to run at anytime through the night, but expire before morning when the computer would be used.

@Wayne-Workman bolder the better, I say 👍

@fredlwal Most probably a FTP credentials problem: https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/Troubleshoot_FTP

And if you don’t want to upgrade to FOG trunk you can find hundreds and thousands of articles on how to generate self signed certificates. Try searching the web. The first few that come up:
https://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/392099-creating-self-signed-ssl-certificates-for-apache-on-linux
http://www.akadia.com/services/ssh_test_certificate.html
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/ssl-certificate-self

Or use tools like TinyCA if you prefer GUI programs.

@Wayne-Workman

Hello,

I’ve checked and tested again today and it’s working now perfectly. I have probably done something wrong. Sorry for this false problem.

cheers.

Thank you @Tom-Elliott

the Win7 and Win10 is probably easier - and you wouldn’t even bother with the ISO itself, but just copy the files to a windows share. Then, if you can just get WinPE to work (there are advanced copies out there now), then use that to just get to the share and launch the setup.exe, far more efficient than loading a huge ISO into the RAM of a machine that may or may not have it to spare.

But, for linux based ISOs, you’d mount as read-only with loopback, and then you’d point to the kernel and init after it’s mounted via NFS. I think you will find the below articles helpful.

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/how-to-mount-iso-image-under-linux.html

http://ipxe.org/appnote/ubuntu_live

@Sebastian-Roth I see. A coincidence this was the IP address of my old server, so that is the reason I asked.

@Tom-Elliott I’m on a roll with these questions with obvious answers…sigh…thanks again Tom!

All snapins do run as the “SYSTEM” user, it’s how the fog client is designed.

What exactly does bitlocker need to operate? I’m new to bitlocker.

OK that makes sense.

Hi all, thx a lot for your Help! Got it workin now!

Hi @Sebastian-Roth

That fixed it 👍 Thanks for your and Tom’s assistance.

Not that I know of…

@Tom-Elliott Done - looks like its working now 🙂

@Frank I don’t know if an update is stable until somebody updates and lets me know if prior issues are corrected for.

It’s one of the “cons” i guess of being on Trunk.

While I try my darndest to keep things as functional as I can, with changes can come problems.

@danilopinotti So the admin network and the academic network are on two different broadcast domains, and maybe even further separated logically via Vlans.

Then you just need a FOG server with two network interfaces (and connect each one to each network). You’d have two storage groups, and in each of those, one master node each, pointing to the exact same directory, but a different interface and IP for each (for the two network interfaces). I think it could work.

Or, just totally separate out the admin images and academic images. Have a storage group for each, and put each one on it’s appropriate interface and IP, and give them each a separate folder.

But Tom is probably right, the location plugin would be far more simple - just have two fog servers, one just a storage node for academic. Set each up as a location, and maybe even give each their own storage group, and make each the master of their group.

Lots of options.

But - the thing that I’m most concerned with is keeping the domain information straight. You’ll really, really need to pay attention to that - or you might find all of your computers joined to one or the other domains… and that wouldn’t be good at all. So there’s a whole lot of possibility for a really large failure with this setup.

@Sebastian-Roth Thank you.