@mpatel Hello!

I have been working on a project for remote use at my company too. We have too many sites that are not way connected (Besides remote support software) to Headquarters. We also have sites in over 25+ countries. I don’t know if this will help, I just wanted to share my experience with the same issue. Unfortunately, its 1 FOG server per Site.

1. I found getting hardware out to these sites is very expensive and time consuming, so I configured a virtual machine to be deployed to a server at each site with FOG pre-installed. (Each site has the same network setup… Thankfully).
2. Most of my images are on Lubuntu, and are less than 2GB. So sending the VHD file was not a large issue. For sites with very low bandwidth, it can take 2 days, but that’s not too bad.
3. One the VHD arrives, it was simple to remote into the device and get all of them up and running. (Using KVM).
4. Since I didn’t want to deploy already captured images to the servers, I used our support software to access the server and capture the images that were needed from the devices in the site. (Getting the MAC and Hostname was not an issue, our support software displays that for us.)

Currently, my next plan involves creating an ISO of linux using Pre-seed and having FOG install and configure itself whenever we deploy new hardware. It has been working in my DEV lab, but I am still logging errors that might pop-up and trying to prevent them. Usually I see errors with the database, but that is usually resolved by not having a MYSQL password.

@mpatel Hello!

I have been working on a project for remote use at my company too. We have too many sites that are not way connected (Besides remote support software) to Headquarters. We also have sites in over 25+ countries. I don’t know if this will help, I just wanted to share my experience with the same issue. Unfortunately, its 1 FOG server per Site.

1. I found getting hardware out to these sites is very expensive and time consuming, so I configured a virtual machine to be deployed to a server at each site with FOG pre-installed. (Each site has the same network setup… Thankfully).
2. Most of my images are on Lubuntu, and are less than 2GB. So sending the VHD file was not a large issue. For sites with very low bandwidth, it can take 2 days, but that’s not too bad.
3. One the VHD arrives, it was simple to remote into the device and get all of them up and running. (Using KVM).
4. Since I didn’t want to deploy already captured images to the servers, I used our support software to access the server and capture the images that were needed from the devices in the site. (Getting the MAC and Hostname was not an issue, our support software displays that for us.)

Currently, my next plan involves creating an ISO of linux using Pre-seed and having FOG install and configure itself whenever we deploy new hardware. It has been working in my DEV lab, but I am still logging errors that might pop-up and trying to prevent them. Usually I see errors with the database, but that is usually resolved by not having a MYSQL password.

@Sebastian-Roth Thanks for the help! Sorry about the late response as well. I will be starting one soon, and we defiantly have a high-speed connection Internally. But we have multinational support and they have slow speeds. Even if it takes 7+ hours to re-image some of their machines, it would save a lot of time from shipping the devices.

I will do some research and document the process for Kubernetes, and possibly HELM support as well.

Is there a possibility of a Containerized FOG Server to be easily deployed to other networks?

I have been doing a lot of research on it lately, and have looked into having a network storage space to keep images.

The Goal is to deploy a containerized FOG Server to another network at a different location (ie. US to UK). And easily deploy images from a network storage from Azure Cloud.

@Sebastian-Roth Thanks for the help. I will deploy another server and retrieve the error log to share here. On another note, I have not been using any other tools other than the FOG server. I’ll reply sooner or later with more information!

Again, Thank you for the help.

@Sebastian-Roth Sorry about that. I was just showing an example of what modifiers I used. (-S, -y, -K, -C) And the combinations I tried with them.

I do install fog as a root user, but I have a habit of using sudo anyway.

Hello again! I am sorry for multiple post with similar issues. I receive a lot of different errors when attempting different installation configurations. I’ll try to organize what I am attempting to do below and the issues I am having.

Scenario:
Attempt to install FOG remotely, pre-configured, using HTTPS and without having a technician watch it. This needs to be done on a decently large scale. In other words, I want to send an installation package to run on a remote machine, and not have to touch it. I will be remotely deploying images to the machine as well.

What I have:
I have setup my .fogsettings with the correct options, but I get stuck either during installation, or when attempting to PXE boot computers.

I have installed FOG using the following lines to test what would help the most.

sudo ./installfog -S -y
sudo ./installfog -S -C -y
sudo ./installfog -S -K -y
sudo ./installfog -S -C -K -y

I understand you get the "Please connect to http://x.x.x.x/fog/management and update the database then press enter to continue during the setup, but this does not happen with the -y option. It can be done manually later. (If you have a way to do it automatically, please let me know )

Since the -S options forces HTTPS, I have gotten it to work after setting the .fogsettings line to the following. (It won’t install if left null)

httpproto='https'

But, the most common issue I am having involves the following error associated with the -S option.

Compiling iPXE binaries that trust our SSL certificate......Failed!

the -C and -K options fixed this error, but when Capturing/deploying an image, I get a long range of TFTP errors, resulting in no PXE boot.

My overall goal is to further secure a FOG server installed from scratch and get it to automatically do so.

Any and all help is much appreciated! I am familiarizing myself with the install scripts this week. So Ill be reading! Hopefully I can respond fast to any questions!

(I will update this post once I get back to my documentation on the issues I have faced to see If I missed anything.)

I might be wrong, but when testing FOG configurations myself, I noticed that using dynamic VHD, and LVM FOG did not want to work. After thorough investigation, I noticed the disks were attempting to grow, but just creating unused space, without expanding the partition itself. I ended up booting into Parted Magic to get a graphic representation of the Disks, and finished expanding them manually.

(For some reason, it did not display unused space in Ubuntu Server 18.04 for me)

If the @george1421 's solution does not work, I would Live boot a Linux Distro with a GUI and investigate the partition layout using the Disk Management tool (Forgot what its really called).

@Tom-Elliott Thanks for the help. Just to Clarify, I should Install FOG, then run:

snmysqlpass='newpassword' ./installfog.sh -y

Which would re-run the installer to change the configuration?

Hello Everyone!

I am currently installing fog using my settings placed in .fogsettings found in /opt/fog/. I run the .installfog script with the -y and -S settings. I need it to install forcing HTTPS with a Mysql password for the root account. (Mysql installs during the FOG installation, I added the following line to the bottom of the .installfog script)

mysqladmin --user=root password "newpassword" 

Either I get the error “Updating DB… Failed” and can only connect to the page once I manually run the above mysql command. Or I get a worse error stating,

“Compiling iPXE binaries that trust our SSL certificate… Failed!”

In this case, I can connect to the DB, but I cannot connect to iPXE because it does not exist.

@Wayne-Workman Thanks for the info. I did modify the .fogsettings file at first, but I was receiving errors for “invalid response” whenever I attempted to install. I just copied the .fogsettings from a working installation.