Client check-in and restart times

[BlankZapper]

I would like to make the client reboots faster for my Windows client.

The Windows FOG Client is installed.

Once a task is assigned to capture, the Windows FOG Client is taking…some minutes before prompting for auto-reboot.

In Fog System Settings, I have changed “FOG Client”, “CLIENT CHECKIN TIME” to 15 and GRACE TIMEOUT to 10 seconds.

But the Fog Client in Windows is still taking many minutes and waiting 60 seconds before auto-reboot.

Is there a way to make it faster?

[Sebastian Roth]

@blankzapper said in Client check-in and restart times:

I removed WinMGMT as dependency of FOG service, and removed random offset added by FOG server. These are dirty hacks, but they work for me.

You seem to digg right into it! May I ask, what is your actual aim with this? You are more than welcome to help us working on the fog-client code as you seem to be pretty good with this stuff.

PS: Didn’t even know the MSI installer sets up so many service dependencies…

[BlankZapper]

@sebastian-roth Thank you for checking. I have found some interesting behaviors:

1. The CAPE agent restarts WinMGMT service when performing analysis. This kills the (dependent) FOG service, which will not restart itself.
2. The FOG server adds random (up to) 90 seconds to sleep interval.
3. As you said, FOG client rejects anything < 60.

I removed WinMGMT as dependency of FOG service, and removed random offset added by FOG server. These are dirty hacks, but they work for me.

Maybe this silent behavior of randomized check-ins can become a visible option in FOG: “Randomize check-in by X seconds”, this is clearly needed for large installs with many hundreds of clients. For me, I have just one machine doing analysis, so fast check-in and restarts are helpful.

[Sebastian Roth]

@BlankZapper Had a look at the client code and it looks like if you set CLIENT CHECKIN TIME to below 30 seconds it will default to 60 (ref).

Wasn’t me who came up with that code but I am fairly sure this was made to prevent from an overload. All clients will checkin to the FOG server that often and that will cause a high load on the server and database when you have hundreds of host with fog-client installed in your network. So they put that in as a measure to prevent people from locking up their server.

As well I think it takes two checkin loops of the FOG client to do the reboot - not sure but from the top of my head. One to schedule the reboot and the next to actually run it. So 30+30 seconds is probably the fastest you can go with the current fog-client.

Feel free to join in and work in this code if you feel this should be changed.