I have more results in progress on the RAMdisk. Hopefully i’ll get them done tonight.

Instead of a VM, could you create a netinstall iso that downloads and installs the OS for you and then launches the FOG installer.

Smaller download, runs on any VM that has internet access, lets the user set their own RAM, vCPUs, HDD and Networking.

You will NEVER please everyone… for me a 250GB VHD would be way too big… for someone else it would be way too small…

2vCPU - reasonable for most, but my home hypervisor wouldn’t run it properly as it’s only on a celeron. 1vCPU, could we run into issues where there isn’t enough CPU? (Neither would a HP Microserver)

1GB RAM - should run OK… but someone will moan that their low end PC ran out of RAM running it… Someone else will moan that it should have more…

In order to run FOG, they need to change their DHCP, You shouldn’t force this onto the FOG server because it could lead to them effectively killing their network when their DNS doesn’t work. They need to know what they are doing to some degree or we will just end up with angry people who don’t have a clue moaning on the forums, giving FOG a bad name.

There is no replacement for knowing your own environment and how it works. We should emphasize that this is not ‘easy peasy’ and will require some level of knowlegde.

git checkout dev-branch
git pull

now running 1.5.0 RC11
Interesting new GUI.

I added a location - it said it was successful however it seems no location was created.
When i clicked to list locations none appeared.

I uninstalled the plugin and re-installed it and it now works.

Thank-You for the quick reply

This is the process for a KMS Server… so use the part that you need.

slmgr.vbs -ipk FJ82H-XT6CR-J8D7P-XQJJ2-GPDD4
slmgr.vbs -skms IPADDRESS:1688
slmgr.vbs -ato
slmgr.vbs -dlv > c:\KMS.log

The key is the public KMS one that you input into clients.

Mod edited to use code box.

I would try to use KMS if you can, if your doing this for OEM it will be a pain…

You could run the script via batch file, snapins, wpkg, opsi, GPO. It all depends how you are setup and how your environment works.

If the NAS can be an NFS and FTP server, skip the fog server and use the NAS as the only storage node.

You could setup BittorrentSync to distribute your images to your storage nodes…

but as for writing an image entirely over bittorrent… would probably be a big rewrite.

I use a VM as my central fog server.

The storage ‘nodes’ are NAS’ (Usually FreeNAS) so if you have Synology, FreeNAS or Qnap you could just set those up as where the data actually moves from.

My FOG Server is over the other side of an IPSEC VPN so I cannot pull images directly from it.

git checkout dev-branch
git pull

now running 1.5.0 RC11
Interesting new GUI.

I added a location - it said it was successful however it seems no location was created.
When i clicked to list locations none appeared.

I uninstalled the plugin and re-installed it and it now works.

Thank-You for the quick reply

‘ID Must be set to edit’

Getting this error when trying to add a location on my new central server.

Using Fog from Git SVN revision 6077

@Junkhacker Yes it was. All of my images are.

So… Deploy with old fog, capture with new fog on a different image set to zstd 11

I noticed on the upload, the screen still says:
Starting to clone device (/dev/sda2) to image (/tmp/pigz1)

The image is Multiple Partition Single Disk (non re-sizeable)

On my old image it has two files… but the new one has three…

I am pulling the image off the NAS now to unpack it and test it, but thought i would pitch in on what i’ve seen so far.

svn revision 6066

We already have the check box for ‘legacy images’ which the admin can use… No reason that the check box on the image couldn’t say which compression method it’s using.

What is in that image? 2.6GB compressed is very small. Does that image download in under a minute normally?

I have a base windows 10 + updates image i can also try. The one i used in my numbers previously had applications in it for a complete system. I will see if i can get that to compress down to something similar.

While my image is a lot bigger if i scale yours up to the size of mine; i am saving a lot more space.

@Tom-Elliott Thanks for putting it into the init.

Would it be as simple as searching through the code for the commands for imaging and changing them to use zstd instead of pigz or would there be more complicated things involved due to the way the commands are generated?

Do you know if most people use multicast or just do multiple unicast for deployments? I have never got multicast to work fully and always end up with each client downloading on it’s own. I have usually had my server set to 4 clients at once except when i had 10GbE and 2Gbit links between MDF and IDF… On that machine i used 8 and with ZFS caching I had no problems with the disk IO of so many transfers.

If we can get improvements via increasing those numbers then it makes things a bit more worth the effort to speed up people’s deployments.

as for uploading… I also have to upload every month or so and with one of my clients i have a 2 hour time window to do all maintenance so uploading sometimes gets delayed as it can take a considerable amount of time.

The other benefit of reduced file size would also help, in my case, by reducing the sync time between sites over WAN.

As people’s machines become more powerful then we can scale with them instead of being held back by the lack of speed in PIGZ. 10GbE is coming down in price and SSD/NVMe/HDD are getting better all the time.

Maybe you just saw the note about 1vCPU. I only reduced to 1vCPU as the numbers with 4vCPU were all so close together.

Also might help to simulate a ‘low end’ machine…

The version of zstd i’ve been using is using all my threads