Odd NFS issue

[pugnacious]

Perhaps some of you enlightened individuals can shed some light on this subject. I’m currently running fog (trunk) on a centos 7 vm running under a vmware hypervisor. The company I work for will be setting up a very large hypervisor in the next month and we plan on moving the fog server to it once it’s active. we are a primarily windows based organization and most of our servers are windows. Our network engineer mapped an NFS share from our storage node and mounted it under the fog server. He mounted it in place of /images on the fog server. To the fog server’s view, the /images folder is identical. Now however we are getting an inability to mount the NFS share from the clients being imaged. I suspect it’s a permissions issue of some kind. The mounted NFS share is NTFS formatted. If one of you has any insight, I’d be happy to provide specific logs or details.

[Wayne Workman]

@pugnacious a local path that is already remote cannot be re-exported in Linux.

You’d be better off just setting up a Read/Write NFS Share on your Windows Storage server, and setting up an account for FTP Access to that share for FOG. Then you’d just add that as a storage node in FOG.

[pugnacious]

I’ve tossed that info to our network engineer, and he seems to understand it. He’s going to add the network NFS share as the primary storage node once he can make it work as a secondary node. Do you have a link to where I should have him look for more information? I know some of the wiki is outdated when it comes to the trunk build.

[Wayne Workman]

@pugnacious

This looks pretty good - it’s mostly got the right ideas. https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Windows_Storage_Node

Mainly, the NFS functionality needs READ access for /images and READ/WRITE for /images/dev

You need two files, called .mntcheck one is located /images/.mntcheck and the other is /images/dev/.mntcheck These are just empty files. The upload/download scripts that fog uses will look to see if these files exist. If they can see them, it means that the NFS share mounted properly, see?

The NFS functionality can be tested with steps found here: https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Troubleshoot_NFS

The FTP functionality needs Read/Write on everything in the /images directory, recursively (or inherited in windows). Then that username and password need used to create a new Master storage node inside it’s very own storage group on the fog server.

The user account for FTP can be tested with steps found here: https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Troubleshoot_FTP

The FTP Path inside of the storage node settings in the FOG web interface can be tricky - the only way to verify that is by testing FTP manually using the steps above.

[pugnacious]

Well, the fog server accepts the node now, however it doesn’t move the images from the dev folder, and I can’t deploy the image to another machine. I’m obviously missing something.

[Wayne Workman]

@pugnacious You’re missing the FTP piece. FTP is what moves images from /images/dev to /images

This article is more specific to FTP on Linux, but should help you: https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Troubleshoot_FTP

[pugnacious]

That was the first thing i checked. The FTP is working on the storage node server. I can connect and create/delete/download/move files.

[Wayne Workman]

@pugnacious said:

That was the first thing i checked. The FTP is working on the storage node server. I can connect and create/delete/download/move files.

Good, but can you connect and do that stuff using the credentials that are set inside of the storage node’s settings in the fog web interface?

[pugnacious]

Yes, I verified all the credentials just in case. The only thing I could think of was perhaps a space in the storage node name or the lack of a trailing slash on the path. I just recreated the node and re-verified everything in the config just to check. I’ll know in about 4 minutes. The good thing about using the node on the company NFS server is that the upload speed is about 4 GB/min which is amazing. Now if I can just get the image to go the other direction.

[Wayne Workman]

@pugnacious The FTP Path matters. if you FTP in, and change directory to /, and look around, what do you see? is this the expected root directory?

The path from / to wherever the images folder is, is what the FTP path should be.

Does cd / work ?

[pugnacious]

If i connect to the FTP server, type the command to change directory to the root, it defaults to inside the images folder. Should it be one directory up?

[Wayne Workman]

@pugnacious That’s fine. That means your FTP Path is /images

[pugnacious]

Well, it failed to work yet again. Is there anything I can check to find out what’s not working? I’m trying a debug capture now.

[Wayne Workman]

@pugnacious said:

I’m trying a debug capture now.

That’s what I would probably have suggested next.

Since you’ve already uploaded, you don’t need to again. Just try to manually move it yourself via command line using the host’s debug environment.

Also, pay attention to the variable dump. Maybe something is screwed up there?

[pugnacious]

What command does fog use to move it? Also, Ctrl + C to drop out of the script, correct?

[Wayne Workman]

@pugnacious said:

What command does fog use to move it?

I’ll find out… stand by…

Also, Ctrl + C to drop out of the script, correct?

Yes.

[pugnacious]

standing by. I’m taking notes as I run into issues, so perhaps in the future, some other person might benefit from my roadblocks.

[JJ Fullmer]

I mount my /images from an attached array straight into the /images folder and it works without issue. But I’m using ubunutu 14.04 and the drive is formatted as ext4. But regardless I imagine it would still work.

What does your /etc/exports look like?

cat /etc/exports

what does your /etc/fstab say? That’s where the options for mounting it in the os would be

cat /etc/fstab

what are the permissions currently on /images?

ls -l /images

Are you on the latest trunk of FOG 1.2? I think FOG 1.2 had a fogstorage user that needed permissions to the storage nodes and its password needs to be set correctly in the gui storage node settings.

Does the graph of the space usage display on the fog gui homepage?

Are you able to mount the nfs drive elsewhere?
for example if you happen to have an enterprise version of windows install the
“client for NFS” in the “turn windows features on and off” found in the “add or remove programs” control panel.

If that client is installed you can mount an NFS share in windows by either
running this command in a run prompt…

\fog-server\images

or
In command line

mount \\fog-server\images Z:
cd /d Z:
Z:\>dir
images directory listing pops up

Granted @Wayne-Workman is probably right saying you should add it as a separate storage node since its hosted on a different machine and a different OS and all. But some of this might help troubleshoot this if getting it to work is possible through your current configuration

[Wayne Workman]

@Arrowhead-IT He’s working on making a storage node work on Windows.

[Wayne Workman]

@pugnacious said:

What command does fog use to move it?

The file that does it is /var/www/html/fog/service/Post_Stage2.php