@vascomorais Seems like your question has mostly been answered, but I wanted to pipe in on your comment ‘I can ask the forum’. YES! These forums are amazing. There are numerous people(Including senior developers) that will respond quickly and intelligently and assist you with problems you have with the system. I can’t say enough good about this community.
Hope FOG works for you, it’s been a lifesaver for me and my organization!
Philip
@imagingmaster21 That’s what I’m working on now. Previously I wasn’t syspreping because I was scared of unattend. But others have convinced me I need to stop being a wuss and try to learn myself real good. I’m almost there. In fact as we speak I just sysprepped a reference image machine and I’m about to capture and test deploy it.
@george1421 I originally didn’t follow your guide to install and activate fpm, I had assume it was default. Once I followed the guide(not without cursing and much looking up of VIM guides), and got it installed and activated my web interface came back up and my clients waiting to image started communicating with FOG again.
I’m still not 100% that it’s fixed or if the last step(restarting PHP and Apache) simply reset the problem and it’s going to reappear in a few hours. I’ve been watching it run for 45 mins or so now and it at least appears to be stable. But we’ll see if it completes overnight or not.
Just wish I had remote capability so I could monitor from home instead of having to come to the office.
Philip
@george1421 Alright. That’s working. Unfortunately another problem that I thought might occur has come to pass. It’s nothing you guys can help with I think though. The whitelist is blocking what FOG needs to install. I’ll have to figure this out. Probably grab a wireless hotspot to connect to at least for long enough to install.
I’ve been fighting with my superiors for months about this network being too restrictive. Ugg.
Thanks again.
So I found the problem. It was a PEBCAK issue. Essentially I had also instituted a group policy restricting membership of the Local Admin group and had forgotten to add my locally created admin to the group policy. So as soon as it created the user and got domained it immediately removed it from the admin group.
Luckily I had a USB with Kali on it laying around so I just hopped on and elevated privilege on a user so I could fix the problem that had arose.
Sorry for wasting the communities time.
Philip
No bitlocker enabled, so I’m not sure why it’s not resizing that partition. I’m in the middle of another image capture attempt, and though it captured the OS partition quickly(and then took 15 ish minutes to move on to the next one after the ‘Cloned Sucessfully’ message) it’s back to the thing where it’s stalled for no apparent reason and dropped back down to miserable speeds.
I am entirely mystified about what is going on. It doesn’t seem to be consistent in what it’s doing. sigh Is there something else I can grab to help identify what’s going on?
New update. Because I was frustrated I just let the laptop sit on that screen as I worked on other things. I’m not sure how long it took, but it was eventually completed. However, when I look at the FOG image list, I’m confused again.
The presysprep image is reporting as 442 GB (should be around 30ish used, with the full partition being 442ish). I understand that this would be the client’s size, but shouldn’t it have shrunk the partition down to minimum size with resizing turned on? (like the image above it, which technically has much more data, but is reporting as a smaller size).
I’m sorry for all the questions, but I feel like I’m missing something obvious here.
Any more ideas? I just went back in and deleted everything other than system created partitions and it’s still giving me this screen. Speed is where I’d expect it, but it refuses to complete the process.
@george1421
It was black and white under the blue cloning screen, as the blue screen moved up one line, and on the bottom, there was a black and white message.
So I’ve been doing some more experimentation. Just tried a different laptop, the same model. I deployed the image that I have successfully captured(though very slowly). It deployed okay. Not as fast as I’d hoped but seemed fairly steady at least.
I then made a few minor changes(that I had forgotten initially) and attempted a recapture, putting it back on zstd. This went blisteringly fast, up to 97%. As in within 5 minutes, it was 97%. Then it hung again and took another 10-15 minutes to ‘complete’ but then hung on the ‘Cloning Successful’ message. I do think I noticed something new, I don’t THINK it had attempted the 500MB recovery partition. I think it had captured the first small system partition and the second ‘main’ partition with the OS, but I don’t think it got to partition 3 (recovery) or the empty partition 4 for some reason.
Regardless, I powered the laptop down and rebooted it to make sure it would. I noticed that partitions 2 and 4 hadn’t been resized back to the original, so I expanded them back out, shut down again and I’m currently trying a new capture, this time using Gzip, to see if that works. Currently, I’m 21 minutes in, and only 43% on the main partition. It’s doing the same ‘hang’ for long periods of time with 0 progress. Update: It also hung at the same point.
Does any of this help?
Edit: So I’ve /maybe/ started to narrow it down. I went back to zstd. But I decided to delete the ‘recovery’ partition, as unneeded. I’ve now captured 2-3 times, in about 3-4 minutes each, except I’m still sticking on ‘Cloned Successfully’ before it hits the last partition(Currently empty). I’ve tried doing it both as resizeable, and nonresizeable. But the speed is what I’d expect to see. Does this point to anything?
I understand completely. I’ll try to provide feedback as I can.
I would personally doubt that this is the issue. The server is quite over powered for what it’s being asked to do (72 x Intel Xeon CPU E5-2697 v4 @ 2.30GHz (2 Sockets), 256GB RAM, RAID10 array of drives).
This could be the issue, or at least I certainly can’t think of a way to eliminate it.
Again, can’t eliminate it as I’m far from an expert in Proxmox
This I think I can at least put as a low probability. I’m currently running another image, and it’s showing the same symptoms. For instance, it went to 15% complete in 20 seconds. Then hung on the same block for over 3 minutes before completing a couple more percent and hanging again.
I think I can eliminate this as well, as I’ve just moved locations of imaging with the same result.
This is possible, I could try another laptop.
Here are two images illustrating what I’m talking about. Second image was taken just after I noticed it was going again, and then it stopped shortly after I took it.
The reason the speed is odd to me is with the old server speeds were significantly faster. I used to(a year or two ago) be able to capture a similar image in a matter of 15-20 minutes. I wish I had more current history, but I’ve been out of control of this server/image process for a year or more, but as I’m the one who originally set it up, when it broke it got dropped right back into my lap.
The compression number was left as default, which shows as 6 currently.
I have not tried to image in the server room, that’s something I could attempt, and I won’t try to argue against infrastructure, as part of this unfolding drama was a series of power failures about 2 weeks ago.
The Proxmox server is not busy. It has one secondary Domain Controller for Active Directory, and now this image server. The goal is to get 1-2 more servers built onto Proxmox, but currently, the old stack is still primary. Even when everything is on this server it should be a minor load, as it’s an isolated network supporting 4 classrooms with a maximum of 20 laptops per classroom.
I am currently running on a single NIC from this server though. I need to figure out that issue soon, but I hope it’s not already an issue. I wish it was as easy for me to get the equipment I need as some people seem to think it is. eyeroll But that’s not your issue, I just need to either find some more ethernet nics, or get my superiors to spring for fiber(which is what 2/4 of the nics in the server are, yay for hand-me-down equipment).
Okay, so sounds like the next step is to try capturing from the server room and check to see if it’s raw image capture. Hopefully, my robocopy finishes soon and I can try that.
As a side note, thank you for your help. I wish I had better answers for you, but I’m a completely self-taught admin, and as such my knowledge has huge holes in it, as I learn what I need to put out whatever fire happens to be dropped in my lap.
I made sure to download the latest versions of the kernels yesterday as part of my installation, as that was a problem I had run into in the past. So… 5.15.34, it looks like.
I don’t have an answer for this one. When I make my next attempt I’ll make sure to take a picture of it. Hopefully, the next attempt will be shortly.
There’s 116 GB used during the last attempt which took 45 minutes. All of that is on 1 partition, the other major partition(excluding the system-built recovery partitions) was completely empty until last night when I started copying the rest of the files over.
The capture rate tends to start at 20ish GB/min, and steadily falls until it hovers around 1 GB/min.
The target computer is a physical laptop with 2 TB NVMe drive.
Hm. As for the FOG Clients… I’d guess 0, or nearly 0. Fresh install, different IP from the server that just failed that I couldn’t figure out. Even if all the previous clients were connected, it would be nearly 0 at the moment, as most of the laptops are put away. 100 at max load though.
New install of dev branch version: 1.5.9.154 on Debian 11.
Hosted on ProxMox server
Attempting to capture Win10 client, multiple partitions, using single disk resizeable settings(also tried multiple partitions, single disk not resizeable). Tried both the default image manager(Zstd I think) and partimage(update: the last time I tried, while it took 45 minutes, partimage, with single disk resizeable settings, worked, I’m not transferring the rest of the files to the master image before running sysprep and seeing how long it takes when the image is full size).
When I try capturing the image it seems to complete and displays a successful message at the bottom of the screen, and then hangs. When I visit the image folder, I can see a mac folder in /images/dev/ but no folder for the image in /images/. I don’t know that it’s related, but the capture process seems to run very sporadically. It’ll go fairly quick, and then hang for a few minutes, fly through a few more percent, hang, rinse and repeat.
I’ve been beating my head against this server for one reason or another for 12 hours today, and I’m not sure where to go next, but we desperately need this working ASAP. Any ideas or things I can provide to give you a clearer idea?
Philip
Sorry, should have looked more closely at FOG before asking this. I see the export/import options.
Philip