Here’s a large scale picture of what we’re going to end up doing in the long-run with Location Plugin.

As you can see the NJ-HQ is the largest imaging office we have. But there are 5 other facilities that image these same rental machines when they end up in their office after a rental or transfer request. So keeping the hosts section of the DB always in sync between them all, even if it is a every 24-hour sync at 10pm has to happen. Because the same machines will end up floating through the different office at times. In the location plugin we know that each Host will have to be edited for it’s location of imaging when it arrives in another office and is put on the bench to image so it doesn’t pull from the last office location it was in.

And yes, I know when we do this, we will need to have /20 subnet to handle it.

@brooksbrown The reasoning behind this is if Node 1, 2, or 3 were to go down for whatever reason, then the machines on that bench would still be able to get an IP from one of the other machines and then PXE boot from that other machine at another bench. It’s a way to create failover on our benches just in the event that failure of a machine happened.

@george1421 DHCP will come from the least hop count. Because each Node is on the same switch that it’s hosts are on, it always gets the IP from that Node on the same switch.

@george1421 Each bench client machines are getting DHCP from the FOG server on that bench. Maybe I’ve gone about setting this up the wrong way, but the theory behind it is, if Node1 machine dies or whatever, we still have the ability to image machines on the other 2 benches.

And again, ultimately we will need to sync these images/DB from our corporate facility to other facilities across the country using the Location Plugin.

Currently, we use Ghost… I’m not even going to get in to that. We’ve been utilizing it for all 12+ years of my employment. But our image sizes are in the 60 GB file size, and over Ghost and our network as it is now, it takes 45+ minutes to over 2 hours sometimes to image machines.

FOG is MUCH MUCH MUCH faster! And I want to utilize it to replace Ghost.

@george1421 See attached network layout image. They are able to talk to each other.

Yep. They’re all on the same subnet. Under storage management they’re all listed and they seem active.

So here’s the setup we’re trying to create.

We have a large corporate facility that images rental computers daily across multiple tech benches. We are wanting to have 3 machines. So I have 3 machines setup with Ubuntu and Fog and one is a master storage node and the other 2 are not Master storage nodes. All 3 of the machines are handling their own PXEboot, DHCP, etc as separate networks for each of the 3 benches.

Currently if I plug in to a bench I get an IP from that bench, I can boot to Fog from that bench’s FOG server, and I can upload or download an image on that machine only.

What we would like to make Fog do is to automatically update the DB across all server machines/nodes as well as sync the images on them to each other.

So if I have a Lenovo e550, that belongs to the e550 host group and I upload its image for the time to Node 2 (not master) from bench 2, that once I register it and upload the image, the DB registration information and the image itself would be sync’d to the other 2 Fog servers: Node 1 (Master) and Node 3.

Now this sync doesn’t have to happen automatically every time something changes. It could be something that happens at the top of every hour or 2 hours. Or happens every night at 10 pm.

Is this possible? If so, how? Currently I imaged an e550 on Node 2, and I see nothing on Node 1 or Node 3 as far as Host registration or the image files themselves.

Any help on this would be great! Ultimately, we would install the Location plugin at a later date as well so that we can set this same sync up between different offices across the country.

Thanks in advance!

@george1421 That pretty much summed up exactly what I’m trying to do. We are trying to isolate our image network from everything else. Currently we are using GhostCast Server, which sucks (as far as speed is concerned), but it is a part of a much larger corporate network and because of that it suffers in bandwidth consistently.

It seems that the best scenario will be to make the Ubuntu box that also houses FOG Server the same box that handles routing of internet packets through the other network card.

To make it clear… I have not tried to get this ETH0 and ETH1 situation actually working yet. I’m looking for guidance on that.

I’m also looking for guidance on why PXE Boot fail and say ARP TIMEOUT.

Server

• FOG Version: 1.3.5
• OS: Ubuntu 16.04.2

Client

• Service Version:
• OS:

Description

I have installed Ubuntu 16.04.2 on to a machine that has 2 network cards. I also installed FOG on to this same machine. The goal is that ETH0 will be connected to the internet over a DHCP network, and ETH1 will be the Fog port that handles giving out DHCP for client machines, but gives them internet access through ETH0.

Also, when I installed the FOG Server and tried to boot a machine with PXE Boot, it receives its IP address from DHCP, but then next to TFTP it says ARP timeout and then exits the PXEBoot agent and starts loading Winblows.