Posts made by andyroo54

I agree with Wayne, I think 250GB should be enough. We can link to how to expand it if they want.

Someone said anything but ubuntu, is there a reason for this? Wouldn’t we want one of the most widely used distro (behind maybe mint) as the basis of the appliance? My vote is for Ubuntu but if someone can explain why something else is a better choice? Just thinking about, if someone has a basic question about the OS they can just google it and get flooded with tons of answers if we used ubuntu.

Regardless of OS, should it have a GUI or not? I think it should for sure. It’s very useful for windows admins coming to linux to start off with a gui, even just a basic one. Maybe LXDE. Maybe even gnome…I know you more seasoned linux admins/devs might shudder at that thought. You would think though, if someone doesn’t want a gui, then they are probably experienced enough to be building their own server anyway, so again I vote yes for GUI…

I also agree the fog installer should run on first startup. But which version should we put in the appliance… trunk or stable? Or should we have both? (maybe a choice in the shell? or two entirely different vm’s?)

Should we configure static or set to DHCP for the OS?

Do most people use fogserver as their DHCP server?

So basically:

250GB HDD
1?2? core single socket CPU
One NIC set to DHCP? Or static?
What type of virtual machine format? If we go with most widely used it’s probably vmware… but sticking with open source… virtualbox?

Also where can we host this once it’s made?

By the way, I wasn’t trying to bash clonezilla, I was probably too harsh, it’s just frustrating when I see IT departments imaging machines manually because they’ve never heard of fog before OR they think it’s too hard to setup.

@VincentJ said in new fog appliance:

@andyroo54
Installing Debian (My preference) and running the install script isn’t exactly hard.
Someone planning to image computers would need to know more than that to get running in the first place.

I know what you are saying about it not being hard, to you, , but think about fogs target demographic. I mean I don’t have hard stats but most surely would be mainly windows sysadmins, that’s where I come from. To me, one of the things holding fog back from being more widely used is it’s ease of use in terms of setting it up, in terms of guides and say, an appliance.

I honestly think clonezilla shouldn’t really exist… why use that when you could use fog?

I think that honestly it is beneficial to be able to install a distro and configure from scratch, but I think as a kind of ‘gateway drug’ an appliance could be really useful. Most windows admins don’t have the time to get into the kind of depth you need to get fog really working well as it is at the moment. I don’t know… is that too harsh? That’s just how I feel. Not so much fog itself, but the guides could be better. I’m happy to help make them better.

I don’t want to make it seem like I’m bashing fog, I love it, and the devs who work on the software are amazing. I thought for a long time Fog was a lost cause but I think Tom Elliott kind of helped revive this, I can’t say I’ve followed it THAT closely but that’s what I’ve noticed anyway.

Maybe I went a bit off topic… ! I do agree I think about keeping the storage separate from the appliance, but like Sebastian said if you use non pre allocated type that kinda gets around it, right?

Not a big bug, but I’ve noticed if you try and upload a snapin that’s too large, it doesn’t report that error. Instead it just says “please choose a name”.

Would be better if it says “snapin too large, please increase max file size”.

OR maybe just increase the upload size for the php.ini file as part of the shell install script? 100M is too small… 3000M is probably a good sweet spot.

Was thinking of making an ‘appliance’, basically just a ready built fog server vm… might just help people who want to get started quickly with fog? I’m just not sure if there’s any demand for it though.

Not sure what it would looks like… maybe some lightweight ubuntu build. Would people want a ‘ready to use’ version which you just turn on and then change things as you need like IP address etc? Or would it be better to maybe automate it all? Like when it logs on first time, run a script that downloads the latest trunk and starts the installer?

I’m just a little hesitant, because I had issues with uploading snapins and stuff so i just rebuilt again but this time used SVG.

I just want to change the default webgui password from password to something more secure… just being cautious because I don’t want to stuff it. Is this password the sql password?

Thanks

@Wayne-Workman

Thanks Wayne.

For anyone who finds this thread, on Ubuntu, just cd to /etc/php5/apache2 then edit php.ini

Using nano to edit, find upload_max_filesize and post_max_size and increase both as desired. I increased mine to 3000M (3GB approx.)

@Wayne-Workman Yeah it’s not a big deal. It was just a nice feature of .32

Like I said it’s a small price to pay to upgrade.

I need more than the 100M default size for snapins. I think the default should be higher, 90% of my snapins are over 100Mb. I found where t do it in centOS but not for Ubuntu?

Thanks

@Wayne-Workman said:

@andyroo54 said:

The idea is to hide all of that from users, so they just see a pretty picture… does that make sense?

I swap around from hide-menu to full menu depending on if I’m imaging a lab or not.

Do all of your systems display a pretty picture when the system is network booting? Mine don’t. What about the POST process? I don’t see why it matters so much. We’re not Apple.

It matters because all of our machines are set to PXE boot as first boot device, then hdd second. It was just nice to have a nice picture instead of a bunch of writing that no one understands. Anyway it’s a small thing to give up if it means I can start imaging these new laptops I’ve got.

@Sebastian-Roth Yes Sebastian, I meant to write yesterday, fog is booting no probs now with the new trunk version. I am getting corruption of the image but that might be the OEM image I’m trying to upload. I’m going to try a win 10 soe today.

Still no good after a reupload after a check disk.

This is the disk of the laptop I’m trying to upload. It’s an OEM image.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/cwBQPap.png[/img]

I tried to upload the image again, but now I get a warning that it thinks windows is corrupt and wants me to run check disk /f…

This is a brand new laptop from dell so it’s strange there could be corruption. Anyway I’ll run checkdisk and try again.

Hi
I’m using the latest trunk. I uploaded an image of a dell latitude E7470 laptop. It uploaded seemingly OK.

I choose win 7 OS
Single Disk -Resizable (same as we used to in fog .32, although it also said NTFS only)
Parition - Everything

I tried to deploy to another E7470 but got the above error.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/VqBBAPo.png[/img]

Thanks Tom that kinda works… it hides the menu, but it doesn’t hide all of the fog stuff.

The idea is to hide all of that from users, so they just see a pretty picture… does that make sense?

I think we did it in .32 but showing the menu background, but hiding the menu text, unless you press any key, at which point it then shows the menu and pauses the countdown to boot…

We are moving from fog .32

All of our machines are set to PXE boot. With .32, an image would appear, and if you didn’t hit anything, then it would exit and boot from HDD. But if you hit a key, it would make the fog menu appear and give you options to register etc.

But now with Fog trunk now it shows the menu and then counts down to boot from HDD.

Is it possible to customize the menu so that it doesn’t show the menu unless you press a key? I’d rather just have a nice background with no menu appearing until the timer exits pxe rom and boots from HDD…

The last guy before me setup fog .32 so I’m not sure if he customized it or if that was the default behaviour of .32?

Thanks,

Hi,

There is a cab file here with all of the drivers for this machine: http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/enterprise-client/w/wiki/11830.latitude-e7470-windows-7-driver-pack

I’m going to setup a new trunk server and see if it can image the machine.

@Tom-Elliott Hi Tom we are using .32

Sorry I’m not sure what you mean by “trunk”?

Oh I see you mean upgrade to the latest version. I’ll see how I go. Last time I tried to upgrade was a nightmare

I do need to rebuild it anyway because i need more storage and I can’t see to easily expand the drive anyway.

Hi,

I’ve got a new latitude E7470 that won’t image… I’m using an older Kernel from about 2013. I tried to update to the latest kernel from Tom from 2015 via the web gui in fog. The update worked but the still “Unable to register host” happens. I reverted to the old kernel and can image older machines again.

I think it’s just because the E7470 is so new it’s not supported by the current kernel, is that correct?

Thanks,

[quote=“Tom Elliott, post: 33943, member: 7271”]I think that’s exactly what it is.

That said you could use the provided undionly.kpxe.INTEL file in the /tftpboot folder as your undionly.kpxe. It’s not guaranteed to help, but it might, and I’m not aware of it hurting other systems either.[/quote]

It’s so strange I booted the E5520 about ten times and it worked 9 times out of 10 on the SANSBOOT mode.

I’ve change it to use kpxe.INTEL and same deal… it works 5 or 6 times them sometimes it just goes to the pxe boot and stays there as above. I noticed there is a maybe error that flashes super fast before it tires to exit iPXE menu. But it’s too fast to catch. Normally it flashes really fast something like “SANSBOOT” but on the times it errors it flashes more text and I noticed the word error.