capture minimum image?

[kylian]

Hello i have a few questions which i couldn’t find a answer to while searching around.
First can i use Fog to deploy netboot images? i have been looking for a clear way to have a library of images ready to be deployed (i know ISO are possible but that’s a bit more complicated and required a good chunk of system memory) i have a lot of computers i use and different laptops and different operating systems many linux distros windows and some other tools.
Also is it possible to capture a minimum image instead of a large system image. what i mean by that is for example i have a arch linux install with a few installed packages and a desktop and user configured that has a disk of 2TB. now i wish to capture a image and don’t want the full 2tb to be captured only the minimum of storage that is used like 8gb. so i can also deploy my arch install on basically any PC that supports pxe and have my software ready to use. so capturing a image and deploying on a difrent system is that possibly to?

sorry if this seems a bit all over the place. if some thing is not clear just let me know. thanks in advance

PS. hope this is the right place to ask this if not i will move it to where it shut be. (verry new here)

[george1421]

First for netbooting. It is possible to do with FOG but not a supported feature. https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/10944/using-fog-to-pxe-boot-into-your-favorite-installer-images

The second part of your question is not clear. FOG only captures data not the entire disk unless the disk is encrypted or LVM. If your reference image is only 8GB in size then it will only capture 8GB. If you want that image to resize based on the target computer then you will (for linux) not use LVM but use standard disk partitions.

[kylian]

@george1421 oke thanks for the reply this makes things a bit more clear. about the second part. wen i capture a image from a laptop with a full arch install can i then deploy that later on different PCs/laptops. that way i could just use a vm and setup all linux distros i want and how i want them to be out of the box basically and load them on to other machines after i have captured there images?

[Sebastian Roth]

@kylian said in capture minimum image?:

so capturing a image and deploying on a difrent system is that possibly to?

Just want to add - this is exactly what FOG was made for!

… captured only the minimum of storage that is used like 8gb.

I am just not sure what exatly you mean by that. As George said, if you use normal partitioning and common filesystems FOG will be able to capture only the disk space actually used instead of the whole disk. Depending on the partition layout you have (run sfdisk -d /dev/sda and post output here) FOG is able to deploy the image to a smaller size disk as well.

[kylian]

@Sebastian-Roth thanks for the reply thats great to hear. what i though was you could capture the image but only deploy it on the same machine because of the hardware.
what i meant by the capture only the minimum of the storage that is used like 8 gb does the partitioning need to have all unused space marked as unused currently it is just a normal install and the 2TB is mostly allocated to the home folder (i could shrink that down to the minimum really easily so that is no problem)

[Sebastian Roth]

@kylian Please run the command (as root) mentioned below and post output here.

[kylian]

@Sebastian-Roth will do wen the capture is done in a litle bit. (already started it about 3 hours ago)

[Sebastian Roth]

@kylian said in capture minimum image?:

already started it about 3 hours ago

In this case I would think it captures in RAW… I would cancel the capture and try to see why it takes so long. A normal capture is done in less than an hour.

Just switch off the machine capturing, cancel the task in the web UI and boot up your ARCH linux and run the following commands and post output here:

mount
lvscan
sfdisk -d /dev/sda

[kylian]

@Sebastian-Roth

label: dos
label-id: 0x4ba3741d
device: /dev/sda
unit: sectors
sector-size: 512

/dev/sda1 : start=        2048, size=     2097152, type=83, bootable
/dev/sda2 : start=     2099200, size=  1463048192, type=8e

thats the output. but wen going to disks i see it is setup as LVM2 so thats the problem i supose (also 750gb thought this laptop was 2tb my bad)

[george1421]

@kylian said in capture minimum image?:

but wen going to disks i see it is setup as LVM2

Yes if you want it to be resizable this needs to be a normal partition not a LVM container.

[kylian]

@george1421 al ride thanks for all help then all my questions are pretty much answered.
PS love fog project so far also a great community by the looks of it

[Sebastian Roth]

@kylian Yes, unfortunately current versions of FOG can only capture LVM as RAW. So you’d need to do a fresh install of that system using a plain partitioning.

When you do this make sure you use GPT (not MBR) and if possible put the largest partition you want to be resizable as last.

[kylian]

@Sebastian-Roth oke i will do that the laptop was just installed so it dosnt matter much it needs a reinstall.
Also does btrsf work? i like it a lot for the snapshots

[george1421]

@kylian Let me double check but I believe that partclone supports btrfs. Partclone does support it I just need to see if FOG turns it on when compiling Partclone.

edit: These are the filesystems that FOG’s flavor of Partclone support

./usr/sbin/partclone.info
./usr/sbin/partclone.dd
./usr/sbin/partclone.restore
./usr/sbin/partclone.chkimg
./usr/sbin/partclone.imager
./usr/sbin/partclone.extfs
./usr/sbin/partclone.hfsp
./usr/sbin/partclone.apfs
./usr/sbin/partclone.xfs
./usr/sbin/partclone.fat
./usr/sbin/partclone.ntfs
./usr/sbin/partclone.btrfs
./usr/sbin/partclone.ext2
./usr/sbin/partclone.ext3
./usr/sbin/partclone.ext4
./usr/sbin/partclone.ext4dev
./usr/sbin/partclone.hfs+
./usr/sbin/partclone.hfsplus
./usr/sbin/partclone.ntfsreloc
./usr/sbin/partclone.fat12
./usr/sbin/partclone.fat16
./usr/sbin/partclone.fat32
./usr/sbin/partclone.vfat

[kylian]

@george1421 alride thanks for the help. i will get to work then