FOG on Raspberry Pi
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Hi,
i am wondering if
a) fog can be installed on Raspberry Pi
b) Raspberry Pi is powerful enough to deploy around 40 workstations per multicast (100 MBit/s LAN) without slowing much. -
I’ve got two Raspberry Pi’s, an original 256mb and a 512mb model, but I’ve never considered running Fog from one. I think the main bottlenecks are going to be the speeds are which hard drives can be read (I assume you would be using an external USB drive?) and the lack of gigabit LAN. I had a performance issues with Fog when using 100MBit/s LAN.
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I’m not saying it cant be done but having one myself and using it for some development, I will say that the processing power of the RPi is going to be an issue even sustaining 100Mbit broadcasts over prolonged periods of time. Its a nice idea but I would seriously consider other options. (IMHO of course).
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I’ll throw my hat in the ring here and suggest considering other options as well. I have a pi which I use at home, I manage a FOG server at work, and I think combining the two would be a relatively painful experience. Especially considering your point b).
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Hi guys… can we use a Raspberry Pi as portable device to go on the field and deploy an image to a single system… Because the network belongs to someone else but the image is mine… currently I have to pick the pc and take it to my network and image the PC… If I had a Raspberry Pi with my image init and then go the location and image the system there and then put that on the network…
*** No they will not give my fog server access" … DOD Network
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If you really want to use the RPi as a portable fog server and you can get it working, why do you really need their network? Just take a crossover cable out with you
Oh… I should add… for those of us who are old enough to have grown up in the 8 bit era of computing… doing this image with a RPi will feel like a 30 year leap back in time. You might also want to consider a tape recorder with a 300 baud interface
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As said in the earlier post, its not something I’ve ever tried, but I could give it a shot.
I still don’t think its a great idea, a laptop running a Fog virtual machine (or a dedicated physical install) would be a much better solution. -
[quote=“Matt Harding, post: 11078, member: 1207”]If you really want to use the RPi as a portable fog server and you can get it working, why do you really need their network? Just take a crossover cable out with you
Oh… I should add… for those of us who are old enough to have grown up in the 8 bit era of computing… doing this image with a RPi will feel like a 30 year leap back in time. You might also want to consider a tape recorder with a 300 baud interface ;)[/quote]
Sweet…
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I’ve managed to install Fog to a 512mb Raspberry Pi using the latest Raspbain image.
I don’t have any spare external hard drives at the minute so the images folder is mounted on a 16gb Corsair Flash Voyager GT USB drive (ext3 filesystem). I’m using a netbook to access the Fog webUI, so there’s no need to bring up a resource hungry GUI on the Raspberry Pi and a laptop with a clean W7x64 install as the client machine. These are all connected through a Cisco ASA acting as a switch. I did initially try using a crossover cable directly to the host but the dhcp service failed to start during boot if the client wasn’t active/up.Fog installed as normal but a few errors occurred whilst actually trying to use Fog. The first was the Task Management page returned a blank page when I tried upload an image. This page, solved that problem:
[url]http://fogproject.org/forum/threads/cannot-create-tasks-task-manager-blank.3823/[/url]The other problem I had was a permissions error on the client when mounting the NFS share just before the image upload started. The cause of this issue was the portmap service not starting properly on boot. To solve this, I installed portmap and made it run at startup:
[CODE]sudo apt-get install portmap[/CODE] this produced some errors but it seems to work ok, then ran:
[CODE]sudo update-rc.d rpcbind enable[/CODE]I uploaded an image and the speed averaged around 490MiB/min, it took about 15mins to upload an 8GiB image. The upload/ process does seem to hang quite a lot, this could be down to using a USB flash drive as the images target. The deployment is much more stable, seems to average between 750/850MiB/min, again the flash drive could be the limiting factor here. It took about 9mins to restore the same image.
I’m not able to try it with more hosts as I don’t have any other Windows machines, I primarily run Linux on all my computers (ext4 filesystem so they’re incompatible with Fog). I’ve got a few pictures of the process which I’ll upload once I’ve resized them.
So it seems that a Raspberry Pi will deploy a single machine reasonably well, personally I’d still use a laptop with a Fog virtual machine.
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Here’s a few pictures. (I’ll link as I know many organisations block dropbox)
[URL=‘https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6242590/FogPi/fogpi.jpg’]RaspberryPi[/URL]
[URL=‘https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6242590/FogPi/upload.jpg’]Upload[/URL]
[URL=‘https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6242590/FogPi/uploadgraph.jpg’]UploadGraph[/URL]
[URL=‘https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6242590/FogPi/deploy.jpg’]Deploy[/URL]
[URL=‘https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6242590/FogPi/deploygraph.jpg’]DeployGraph[/URL]
[URL=‘https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6242590/FogPi/deploygraph2.jpg’]DeployGraph2[/URL]edit: Sorry, seem to have linked the full size images for the deployment ones.
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Thats some real nice work there moss… great stuff. Love it.
As for the dhcp server issue with crossover cable… not tired this, but couldn’t you just configure it for a range of local ip’s and add the ethernet port as another scope? Wonder if that would be possible.
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I installed fog project in my raspberry 512mb.
we have a few problems that solved in that page. Thanks to moss
The deployment started to 450Mib/m and up to 1,12gib/m.
With the plugin named Capone in fog we can deployment images automatically only plugin the pc in our network.
[URL=‘https://www.dropbox.com/s/poo4vm5d6j8wm80/folio13.jpg’]Deploy[/URL]
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Haha good stuff. That’s actually a lot better speed than I was expecting.
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[quote=“Matt Harding, post: 11078, member: 1207”]If you really want to use the RPi as a portable fog server and you can get it working, why do you really need their network? Just take a crossover cable out with you
Oh… I should add… for those of us who are old enough to have grown up in the 8 bit era of computing… doing this image with a RPi will feel like a 30 year leap back in time. You might also want to consider a tape recorder with a 300 baud interface ;)[/quote]
Yes, those were the days my friend… I think that this generation of youth is so darn spoiled by luxurious internet bandwidth, wireless connecting gadgets and fast processors, that they would not dare to take a step back. They do not care how it was, unfortunately…Spoiled…
Btw, you forgot to mention the parallel cable between computers, and later serial, and then BNC and the first mainframes and so on… memories… -
Just waking this old topic up again because let’s face it while it was laughable to think about running a FOG server on a Pi 1 or 2 the 3 and 4 are more than capable and in fact the Pi4 8Gb is not only comparable to that old PentiumDuo Core but actually exceeds it in many ways.
So yeah… a FOG Raspberry Pi Image ain’t so far fetched as it once was.
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@develroo I’ve had the FOG server running on raspberry pi 2 for quite a while. That is the 1.4.x series. For fog 1.5.x you should run that on a Pi3 or Pi4. The matter of fact, for fog imaging a Pi is more than enough for hosting the fog server. Now realize that the scope of service is for imaging a small number of system and no computers running the FOG client. The Pi4 is a bit more capable with 1GbE networking and USB3 for externally attached sata drives. The Pi 2 suffers with 100Mbs networking and USB2. The Pi3 has 1GbE networking and USB2.
For FOG imaging all the Pi needs to do is monitor the imaging process and move the image from local storage to the network adapter. The target computer does all of the heavy lifting. So the Pi3-4 is more than enough for acting as a limited or mobile FOG server.
