Fog with multiple hard drives
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Hi All, I started looking into FOG last week and have learned a ton.
I’ve set up the server and it’s running successfully with PXE on the same network segment.I have two questions.
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some of our workstations have 1 hdd and some have 2. I’ve seen tutorials online of restoring images and it seems straight forward enough, but how do I capture an image of only 1 of the hard drives and restore to a drive of my choosing? (may not always be the same drive). ----or is this even possible?
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this may be the wrong forum to ask for quick help on iPXE, if so then just ignore… but I’m having trouble with the ROM-o-matic build I’m creating. It’s not showing the FOG formatted screen properly. There is no image, it’s all blue, and the tables don’t look to be lined up properly. I’ve ensured that I have selected PNG image support, but not sure where else to check here… (i suspect it might be a resolution issue of the test VM that i’m using, but not sure yet).
Any and all help with the above would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
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I ca help with your first question, but not the second. To restore an image to a second drive you can set that on the host page for each host, under general there is “Host Primary Disk” to change the drive you send the image to you change that field to /sda for the first drive /sdb for the second and so forth. You can run debug to find which drive shows up in which order on the particular machine.
As for the second part maybe someone else can help with that issue.
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@ITSolutions said:
You can run debug to find which drive shows up in which order on the particular machine.
thank you for your reply! I appreciate the help.
Is there a way to tell this information from the server side? Is it possible to, say, return the drive type/serial number?
or would using something like WMIC something that I would have to resort to here? -
@Eldorado Why would you want to build your own iPXE binary? Not that I try to keep you from doing it. Always a good starting point to look into and learn a lot about PXE booting. Just saying that it’s not needed usually. FOG provides a whole range of binaries in /tftpboot. Check out those to see if any of these is working for you - BIOS as well as UEFI…
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@Sebastian-Roth hi Sebastian - thanks for your reply.
I have everything working in a VM test environment as it should be (background and all) when server/client are on the same IP subnet.
The problem is in our real world environment, we have many different IPs ranging from 10.2.x.x, 10.3.x.x, 10.4.x.x, etc… — and we do not have direct access to the DHCP server.
I’m new to all of this PXE booting business, and thought that this was my only option.
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great success with #2 above – I was missing CONSOLE_FRAMEBUFFER and CONSOLE_DIRECT_VGA.
Adding these in allowed the menu to appear as it should… awesome! one step closer.
any additional suggestions on how to best manage multiple client hard drives?
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@Eldorado said:
@Sebastian-Roth hi Sebastian - thanks for your reply.
I have everything working in a VM test environment as it should be (background and all) when server/client are on the same IP subnet.
The problem is in our real world environment, we have many different IPs ranging from 10.2.x.x, 10.3.x.x, 10.4.x.x, etc… — and we do not have direct access to the DHCP server.
I’m new to all of this PXE booting business, and thought that this was my only option.
Why would you not use dnsmasq to supply the pxe boot information instead of building your own ipxe boot images? dnsmasq can be used to fill in missing information that your dhcp server can’t/won’t supply.
Are the FOG supplied ipxe images flawed or do they function incorrectly on your hardware?
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@george1421 said:
Why would you not use dnsmasq to supply the pxe boot information instead of building your own ipxe boot images? dnsmasq can be used to fill in missing information that your dhcp server can’t/won’t supply.
Why would you not just set your DHCP to support your infrastructure? That’s how I see it. In my mind, proxyDHCP is best suited for a mobile FOG server.
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@Wayne-Workman said:
@george1421 said:
Why would you not use dnsmasq to supply the pxe boot information instead of building your own ipxe boot images? dnsmasq can be used to fill in missing information that your dhcp server can’t/won’t supply.
Why would you not just set your DHCP to support your infrastructure? That’s how I see it. In my mind, proxyDHCP is best suited for a mobile FOG server.
George – I’m new to everything around here… what i’ve done, i only started even reading about a couple of days ago. can you give me more information on the dnsmasq method you mention? It might suit my needs better.
Wayne – our environment is very different from most workplaces as there are multiple IT teams in a hospital environment. The hospital manages the network and infrastructure - my team just supports a single department within the big group… so chances of the hospital allowing us to edit the DHCP server is next to nil.
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@Eldorado Since you are in a heavy regulated industry make sure you have approval to use FOG in your environment. There should not be any HIPAA impact (no PII will be stored in either the FOG console or the source image), you just need to ensure that everyone is on board with this software being installed in your campus. (enough of the legal disclaimer).
I took your post as that you didn’t have access to your dhcp servers or your dhcp servers couldn’t supply the necessary settings to pxe boot fog. That is where dnsmasq comes in. It can supply the missing boot information using proxyDHCP.
Here is an example of how I setup dnsmasq for one of my projects. I’m not saying its the only way, just it worked for my situation. https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/6376/install-dnsmasq-on-centos-7
You could pxe boot using a USB flash drive too, then you wouldn’t need to touch dhcp all. For BIOS mode https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/6347/usb-boot-bios-client-into-fog-menu
For UEFI mode https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/6400/usb-boot-uefi-client-into-fog-menu-harder-way
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@Eldorado There are also more generic instructions in our Wiki here:
https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Using_FOG_with_an_unmodifiable_DHCP_server/_Using_FOG_with_no_DHCP_serverYou can also configure the FOG server as a 100% mobile fog server using a project I threw together:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/fogupdateip/This allows your FOG server to not use a set IP, and sets up dnsmasq for you. Every time the server’s IP changes, all IP settings in FOG and dnsmasq are automatically updated.
