Best Distro to use for stress-free FOG installation

[Cyrus]

Hey guys, I was having a tough time installing FOG on Centos 7, mostly with the problem with mysql-server. I found posts that said to install MariaDB, then I learned that MariaDB was dropped for something else… I tried to install Maria and the old one, and there were many issues. The whole thing was just a big mess.

So I wiped and I want to start new. What is the most straight forward distro that I can install FOG on? I just want to run the script and have it work afterwards.

Thanks!

[Tom Elliott]

Where are you hearing what?

[Wayne Workman]

@Cyrus CentOS 7 for FOG Trunk.

I don’t even recommend fog 1.2.0 any more. Just go straight to trunk. It’s solid.

[JJ Fullmer]

@Cyrus Having installed it on many flavors, I would say for stress-free installation Ubuntu is a good bet.
However, I found that there are a lot issues that happen later from ubuntu doing silly things that will make things break. Like the re-occurring php package debacle of just a couple weeks ago.

I just moved my production fog server to centos 7 yesterday and while the install of centos gave me a little trouble (because of a legacy hardware issue) the install of FOG and subsequent updates and having everything up and running has been a dream. Also, since it is Red Hat, having experience with that looks better on a resume’ to some bigger companies if that’s something you care about.

So I would say stick with centos 7.

As for the mariadb issue, I didn’t have any issue there. From what I understand mariadb is just a new name for mysql (there’s more to it than that I realize, but to simplify it I’d say that)
There are some notes in the wiki about mariadb during centos 7 install you could try, but I think it’s a bit outdated now since FOG installs mariadb now.

https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Installation_on_CentOS_7

Did you have any mysql related errors during the fog install script, or was this while trying to install it before hand. The best stress-free solution would be to let the fog install script take care of installing the requirements. If you haven’t actually configured anything yet and you think you broke your mariadb install in some way, I would go ahead and just reinstall centos 7 and follow the instructions in that wiki post. It worked for me just yesterday.

[Cyrus]

@Arrowhead-IT Yeah, I was having some issues. I tried to install MariaDB, but yum keeps telling me something like mariaDB has been replaced by mysql-community… Something.

It was pretty annoying, and headache worthy.

Let me try this Trunk thing, and if it doesn’t work I’ll just try ubuntu…

Thanks guys.

[JJ Fullmer]

@Cyrus So you haven’t actually installed any sql services?
I would just add the packages reccomended by the wiki ignoring any errors because some of them are just outdated…

rpm --import http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-6
rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
rpm --import http://apt.sw.be/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt
rpm -Uvh http://pkgs.repoforge.org/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.3-1.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm
rpm --import https://www.elrepo.org/RPM-GPG-KEY-elrepo.org
rpm -Uvh http://www.elrepo.org/elrepo-release-6-5.el6.elrepo.noarch.rpm
rpm --import http://rpms.famillecollet.com/RPM-GPG-KEY-remi
rpm -Uvh http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-6.rpm

Then manually install these packages

yum -y install htmldoc ttf2pt1 t1utils fltk subversion wget git

Then make a folder for the fog installer git and cd into it, download fog, and install it, for example…
(replace ‘fog’ with your username if you are going to let the installer create the fog user for you)

mkdir /home/fog/fogInstalls
mkdir /home/fog/fogInstalls/git
cd /home/fog/fogInstalls/git
git clone https://github.com/FOGProject/fogproject.git ./ #this part will take a little while
cd bin
./installfog.sh # follow the prompts
# Then configure the firewall per this post (https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/6162/firewall-configuration)
for service in http https tftp ftp mysql nfs mountd rpc-bind proxy-dhcp samba; do firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=$service; done
systemctl restart firewalld.service

Then whenever you need to update

cd /home/fog/fogInstalls/git
git pull
cd bin
./installfog.sh -Y

and that’s all there is to it.