I know I’ve been out of this for a little bit. I check in here or there, but just been extremely busy.

I don’t want to stop contributing, I just am taking time for myself after my workly duties.

I have to give a big gratitude and thanks for everyone here trying to help out whether by code, by helping the rest of the community, or documentation.

@Sebastian-Roth I know you’re busy but you’ve kept the project rolling even with the minimal availability you have. Thank you.
@george1421 I’m sure you’re busy, but I still see you posting and helping where possible and amenible. Thank you.
@Wayne-Workman I know you’re helping where you can as well. (Of course I can’t exactly post everybody because I’ve been busy and honestly not keeping up with the forums as much as I probably should.)

@everyone Thank you. Thank you for still believing in this project. We’re doing the best with what we have. Please understand in we’re lacking, it’s most likely unintentional. I know I’m just busy.

https://news.fogproject.org/fog-1-3-5-and-client-0-11-11-officially-released/

https://news.fogproject.org/fog-1-5-0-rc-11/

TLDR; Rerun the fog installer if you have lost “Database Connectivity” to your fog server, or run the ALTER USER syntax shown below.

So Ubuntu 16, among others I suppose, enable a “security updates” to be applied automatically as a “default” to things. Why, well it makes it simpler to ensure your Ubuntu systems are in compliance and patched for any potential exploits. This causes unknown and unexpected issues.

I figured it’d be a safe thing to express that there could be problems (as many of you have already experienced) that when these updates go up (with or without your knowledge) it can break functionality in unexpected and inopportune ways.

The quickest fix is to simply rerun the fog installer which should correct the problem.

As a note, it seems this problem is specific only when the mysql account is the 'root' user AND the password is blank.

The “fix” if you must do it manually is to open a terminal and obtain root:
Super (Windows Key) + T then sudo -i (in most cases).

From there, open mysql with mysql -u root

NOTE: MySQL MUST be run with ROOT.

Run:

ALTER USER 'root'@'127.0.0.1' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY ''; AND
ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY '';

It’s okay if one of them fails. This is going to fix Most people’s issues.

I would highly recommend removing the unattended-upgrades as many of these “sudden” issues came as a security patch ubuntu pushed out. By default Ubuntu typically set’s this for you as enabled and it can cause havoc on you as you (the admin) may not have “done” anything.

To prevent this problem from happening in the future you could run:

apt-get -y remove unattended-upgrades (AS Root again).

FOG is still actively being developed. It’s not necessarily readily apparent, but we can assure you things are still being worked on. These updates may not be communicated in a way that everybody just knows, but can easily be seen if one were to look at our repository site.

Between our own schedules and lives, we can get very busy. We try to keep things updated and help out on the forums even during lull periods. This might mean we aren’t pushing an RC or release as frequently. It may mean we’re working on other things for the project, such as can be seen if looking at our github site.

Our forums are heavily active, and this should point as an indicator to our “status” as well.

If anybody would like to see an increase in developers donating their time to making this free software, consider donating either with monetary support or by spending personal time to help with development.

FOG is an open source project - it’s even in the name. It is driven by people donating their time and resources. The releases of FOG revolve around when developers can spare a few hours throughout the week. Sometimes that will mean releases will be further, sometimes that will mean releases will be faster. That’s just the nature of our project, and many other open source projects.

Hey everybody,

I know you see me here on occasion from time to time. Life decisions have made it more difficult for me to do things I would normally be doing. Rest assured, I am still around, and while I’m not quite as active as I was in the past, it’s not because I don’t want to be.

I had to move, and as part of that I have none of my normal development stuff readily available. Part of the move made me not have a laptop, until today.

I need to setup my dev environment again, so it may take a little bit, but I will be back up.

That’s correct. The main reason fog is constantly moving forward is because the codebase is improved upon. Major bugs tend to be addressed for the next release. We don’t do an LTS because there’s really two main people working on fog in a consistent manor. Those two are @Joe-Schmitt and myself. Debian and Libreoffice have the team too be able to perform such a feat. Their product is Opensource but they have an employment team which can afford them that luxury. FOG has a team but we make no money and as such are required to work full time jobs. We work on FOG in our free time. I’ve had the ability to even work on it from work because we used the software.

Maintaining many different versions is difficult. And we don’t have a support team. WYSIWYG and I think we’ve done pretty well on support, even if we don’t have the ability to do dedicated support for our product. 1.5 was a major step toward modernizing the GUI. 1.6 will vastly improve on this. It was only recently we kind of came up with a road map on how best to proceed. Of note, 1.5 will be maintained until 1.6 is released. 1.6 is focused on making he GUI much more modern. 1.7 will be focused mostly toward fixing and refactoring the FOG client. 1.8 will focus on making the FOS system more modular and usable. I don’t know yet for 1.9. 2.0 will bridge the gap for our rewrite based on the work from 1.5 and up. While we do plan to try to do backports where possible, it’s much easier to ask people to update to the latest version than it is to try to maintain many different versions with backports in mind. At least for what FOG does.

I doubt this will appease anybody, but it’s what I think needs to be said. We are working hard and provide support for our product as best we can. The community makes fogs support system, I think, one of the best around. Add to that and you can almost always have a developer working side by side to help and fix issues as they come up, I don’t think it’s unfair to ask users to update to a specific version. Even if there are bugs, we will always try to correct what we can, when we can. (And normally it’s a pretty quick turn around).

I’m not perfect and I’ll give you that. We don’t even have a test suite to know if things are working as intended. We have to rely on the community and suggestions are great, just understand our answers won’t always be what people want to hear.

https://news.fogproject.org/fog-1-4-0-officially-released/

https://news.fogproject.org/fog-1-4-4-officially-released/

https://news.fogproject.org/fog-1-5-0-rc-12/

@Fog_Newb I don’t know how to replicate the problem you had unfortunately, but I believe I made a fix for the issue you were having. The function is expecting the parameter to be a string, and we were sending a null. I’m now going to have it send in an empty string instead which should prevent that problem moving forward.

Thank you.

I still wish I could get you to look at 1.6 but I understand the hesitation

@Fog_Newb Can you provide your http/php error logs?

See my signature for locations (or very similarly close to)

@plegrand

I don’t know if it will work or not.

We had one person try it, and I just got around to adding what they suggested as found here:
https://github.com/FOGProject/fogproject/pull/733

I think it will work just fine, but we won’t know for sure until someone tries. What works for one may or may not work for another, so your mileage may vary.

@janez3k said in Fog iPXE Menu no input:

https://pastebin.com/xWhJkDX1

Thank you for this, I have copied and pasted what you have. The only part i noticed (though I left it for now) is the missing building of ncm--ecm-axge

I don’t know that this file is particularly in use so I think it’s safe to keep out but If I’m wrong I’m sure we’ll learn about it quickly enough.

I have pushed this version of the IPXE building script to both working-1.6 and dev-branch.

This won’t become part of the release until the 15th of September (at this point), but is available for testing on the bleeding-edge/beta channels.

@ProfessorFow There is the ability to replicate images across groups. You can set which “groups” images need to replate to by associating images to multiple storage groups. You can even define which storage group is the primary.

@ProfessorFow If you create storage nodes, and this is the worry, separate them by Storage Groups.

My guess is all your storage nodes, right now, Remote/local/etc… are all part of the same storage group.

It doesn’t know your latency situations or that any specific node is “Remote” vs. local.

All it knows is “I have x nubmer of nodes in my group, I’m going to use the one with most resources available to run to perform the task at hand.” if no nodes are busy at the time, it’s whatever is the first to return.

If you have “local” nodes, keep them in a group, and if you have remote nodes, keep those remote nodes localized by their own storage group.

Storage groups can be any method you choose, though I’d recommend keeping subnets as different storage groups.

@RAThomas If the value is empty it shoudl think it’s false, and since it seemed to be random that’s where I got confused. But I’m glad this is working for you.

Thank you!

So once tasks get created it will have 'taskDebug`

set to 1 I believe:

so Maybe;

select * from tasks WHERE taskDebug=1;

It may help point us to why you’re seeing them go into debug. Theres a few other options though may need a remote session (if and when you’re able and I’m able as well I suppose?) to try to troubleshoot a bit further.

@RAThomas I’m concerned that it’s randomly entering debug. If it were all machines, all the time.

That said, when you create the image you can define the task type to also include debug mode.

can you walk us through the exact steps?

If it were all, you’d look at fog settings.

The UI probably shows it as just Kernel Args, or something similary:

The DB side would be:

select * from globalSettings where settingKey = 'FOG_KERNEL_ARGS'\G

Sorry for not having a clean direct answer right away, but working through it is all we can do right?

@RAThomas If you’re comfortable with mysql, I might suggest taking a look at the database:
You’ll have to get your fogmaster password from the /opt/fog/.fogsettings file. snmysqlpass

sudo mysql -u fogmaster fog -p

select hostID,hostName,hostKernelArgs where hostKernelArgs LIKE '%debug%';

This might not be the best way but since I don’t know where the debug will show up in the hostKernelArgs, this is the best method I can give right now.

Most likely, I believe, you’re going to see your hosts with these.

If that doesn’t yeild anything, are the hosts part of a group? in which case the group likely has the kernel arg also, so check with:

select groupID,groupName,groupKernelArgs where groupKernelArgs LIKE '%debug%';

I’m suspecting one if not both of these will yield you back the results to help you fix the affected items?