The future of partclone and therefore FOG as it is

[Tom Elliott]

@george1421 The 200 MB split option isn’t really legacy, in fact quite the contrary.

The idea of the smaller MB options was so you could fit the files on a series of CD’s if needed. This isn’t necessary for most people though, but I could see it being useful in some cases.

[Junkhacker]

@george1421 pigz still outperforms gzip. gzip still doesn’t support multi-threading, and i don’t think they have any plans to implement it. also pigz uses a slightly different formula for it’s rsyncable implementation that i have tested to be slightly better at creating chunk data that dedups.

blame me for the 200MB split code. it was an experiment that got pushed into the mainline code, but the idea was to make it easier for people running FOG to make backups to CD/DVD/external hard drive.

[george1421]

@george1421 said in The future of partclone and therefore FOG as it is:

–ignore_crc

Still no joy restoring a previously captured image using partclone 0.3.12. Just to be sure I changed the target system’s inits back to the FOG default init and the image deployed correctly on the target computer.

Next step is to rebuild a reference image and capture it with partclone 0.3.12 to see if its a legacy vs current partclone issue.

For reference here is a link to my test init: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1L3CxtRXn4cwLksu-41OcGyZ_yd5qlK1h

[Junkhacker]

@george1421 line 2052 of funcs.sh needs the -aX0 flag set, but i don’t see anything else wrong yet. i’ll test it as soon as i can.

[Junkhacker]

i tried the init you supplied, and i got a "failed to set disk guid (sgdisk -U) (restoreUUIDInformation)

though, it did boot fine

[Junkhacker]

if i use the init @Sebastian-Roth supplied here https://forums.fogproject.org/post/119056 and edit the funcs.sh to remove the --ignore_crc flags, i have no problems when deploying any images. just fyi

[george1421]

@Junkhacker

Ok first of all I updated the init on the google drive (the end result here will be to provide the developers a diff file between the changes and the original).

So your deployment worked and mine did not. So we need to find out what’s different.

In my case it was a uefi image deployed to a Dell 6430 in uefi mode. Using the original inits this system deployed ok. With the partclone v0.3 it did not.

The deployed image was Win10 Ent 1803 partclone gzip compressed. OS=Win10 (9) single disk resizable all partitions, compression 6.

I’ve got tied up today so I haven’t had a chance to build a new golden image to attempt to capture and deploy with the same (upgrded) partclone.

[Junkhacker]

@george1421 mine was a bios image deployed in legacy mode. the image was a Win 7 Ent zstd compressed resizable, compression 11.
i also tested a windows 10 image that was otherwise the same.

with uefi, the UUID information not applying error i got would be important. did yours throw a visible error? do your partitions have the data intact on them, or are they corrupt? (i had problems in testing with corrupted deployment when using the --ignore_crc flag is why i ask.)

[george1421]

@Junkhacker They were corrupt. I could see the partition types as uefi boot and such, but could not mount them.

I think I have something else going on here. I just tried to recapture a uefi golden image and I have an error about getPartitionLabel: command not found on line 486, then partclone exited with error code 139. So I’m going to have to do a bit more research, maybe uefi mode is causing something if bios mode worked for you.

I may need to start with something simple like win10 bios mode and see where it starts to fall down.

[Junkhacker]

@george1421 is it possible that you tried to deploy a legacy image with partclone 0.3 and the --ignore_crc flag set, then captured it again, or something like that? or maybe captured without checksums with 0.3 and redeployed it with --ignore_crc? i know for certain that the second of those two will result in corrupt partition without reporting any problem. (it tries to skip the blocks in the image file where the checksum would be, but there it skips actual data because there’s no checksum)

[Junkhacker]

downloaded the init_p3 file and tried again. got the UUID error again, but it boots fine.

[george1421]

@Junkhacker What I’m currently testing is an legacy image captured with the original inits and then deploying with the test inits from this thread. In that case the test inits (partclone 0.3.12) should have all of the --ignore_crc switches removed.

I’m doing this to confirm we won’t have issues with previously captured images and the new inits.

Well after deploying a simple win7 bios mode its also failed to this same test computer. So at this time I need to start back from a known good state and change only one thing at a time.

[Junkhacker]

@george1421 that’s the same as i’m doing. i just thought maybe in your testing an upload might have taken place with 0.3.12 by accident. i’ve been deploying images using my dev server, some of which i copied over from my production server. i haven’t seen any problems other than the UUID thing i posted.

[george1421]

@Junkhacker Well this is all good information. In your environment (except for the UUID issue) its deploying correctly. The other thing (thinking about all of the variables here) is that I’m running 1.5.4 on my production server. I’m pretty sure that 1.5.4 inits were created with a previous release of buildroot than what I’m building against. Its possible that buildroot updated applications too, but if everything appears to work in your environment this I can take one step to rule out buildroot differences causing this issue. As well it could be this old laptop that has issues. I’ll keep working on eliminating non-issues.

Thank you for your feedback.

[Sebastian Roth]

@george1421 Great stuff you are working on this full on!! I try to follow up on what you post and test. Though I don’t have the time to engage in this at the moment.

It’s interesting you and Junkhacker seem to get different results and it would be very important to figure out why. I can’t imagine it being a UEFI vs legacy difference issue as partclone should just be deploying the actual contents of the partitions no matter what the boot type or partition layout looks like. But what do I know…

@george1421 said:

I just tried to recapture a uefi golden image and I have an error about getPartitionLabel: command not found on line 486, then partclone exited with error code 139.

Not sure which version you used because we removed getPartitionLabel stuff recently. Please make sure you use the very latest version (master branch).

@Junkhacker The UUID error you see stems from an issue we had in the inits when I created the one you use for testing. This was fixed some weeks ago.

i tried the init you supplied, and i got a "failed to set disk guid (sgdisk -U) (restoreUUIDInformation)

Can you please post a picture of that?

[Junkhacker]

@george1421 more info for you, my dev server is 1.5.5 my prod is 1.4.4. not sure what versions the images files would have all been captured on, but i’ve tested 1.4.4 or earlier (not sure) though captures with 1.5.5.

[Junkhacker]

@Sebastian-Roth

[Tom Elliott]

That looks like an error code of some sort, weird.

[Junkhacker]

@Tom-Elliott yeah, definitely doesn’t look like a UUID (sorry the image is shrank and funny, was trying to get the image size down to upload)

[Quazz]

@Junkhacker The following commit changed UUID stuff https://github.com/FOGProject/fos/commit/f49b0f7d5b0c90866a6dcdbbd5d59e529857242e

On MBR, the label-id is in the form of what appears to be an error code (0xrandomnumbersandletters) hence the output that you saw.

I don’t know for sure why it would fail, but something in that direction possibly.

edit: Ok, so, in d1.partitions it’s saved as 0xlabelid whereis sgdisk expects it as labelid

The original method used blkid -po udev which does not put 0x in front.

Shouldn’t be too hard to fix