@gn_ro

You would need to face your FOG Web UI to the internet to do that (Lets encrypt requires access to port 80). And doing that is not recommended by the FOG team.

Been out of the loop for a while. Which branch is currently considered the best to be on? Master or Dev? I am currently on master 1.5.8 and getting ready for our summer imaging so I want to make sure I upgrade to the latest recommended version before I hit the ground running.

Thanks

@tom-elliott

I understand that as it currently stands that isn’t possible. My recommendation was to see if it was possible to modify the FOG Project’s revenue stream in order to support the project long term.

Other open source projects don’t charge for the product itself, but rather for support, or in the case of something like Zammad for feature requests. Between customers who want to pay for support and customers who want to pay for additional features it might be possible to increase the revenue stream enough to support 1 or 2 full time developers and hopefully additional support person/people.

@Sebastian-Roth

I don’t really have anything to contribute, but has the team thought about a paid support model? Being able to pay something to developers may entice some to work on the project.

@alan-lim

This is really just a starting point. You should adjust the instructions based on the mount point for your NetApp storage.

@alan-lim

@george1421 has a write up here:
https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/10450/adding-additional-image-storage-space-to-fog-server

Not sure how up-to-date it is, but it should give you a starting point.

@wayne-workman
Just checking to see if you’ve moved on this at all or if there is anything I can do to lend a hand. I have a decent sized lab with both Xen and ESXi if anything needs testing.

@cyannella

I don’t know how keen you are on blowing up your dev environment, but if you run Xen or XCP-ng for your environment. XenOrchestra has a huge number of backup options which would probably meet your need. They wouldn’t be FOG images, but they would be VM backups that could be restored, and depending on how you choose to go forward with the backups you can even pull individual files out.

@george1421

Good to know. I’ve been rolling with the same script since Win7 and likely would not have looked at another way to do it short of it failing to run on a new version.

We do something similar to @george1421 but since we have a much more limited number of models to support (think 4 rather than 12) we inject the drivers before we capture the image from the VM.

We use enterprise Dell hardware so I download the driver CABs, then I extract all the drivers to a folder on the desktop called “Drivers”. I then run the following script to put them the driver store.

REM Will find and install all inf files in a folder called 'Drivers' on the current desktop

FOR /R "C:\Users\%USERNAME%\Desktop\Drivers\" %%G IN (*.inf) do pnputil -a "%%G"

Keep in mind the are STAGED not Installed. So they are simply available to the machine at first boot to choose from.

I find this simpler than the injection process and the additional space used is negligible, though it doesn’t scale at large, but like I said we only have a handful of models. And now with Win10’s release cycle I can re-evaluate which drivers we put in the base each time we prep a new OS.

@wayne-workman

vmdk is probably the most broadly cross compatible short of something like an ova

@sebastian-roth @gutter

I’m assuming in this scenario you are trying to migrate from one machine to another, the original machine being BIOS based and the new one being EFI. If that is the case there really wouldn’t be a clean way of doing this and it WILL be messy.

The solution I posed in that thread was to get around VirtualBox’s problems with PXE booting on EFI. In that case I AM making an EFI image and deploying it to EFI machines, and am only changing the virtual machine to BIOS during the capture process.

@wayne-workman

I lean toward a VM over docker only because docker takes a different skill set where with a VM beginners can simply load up virtual box or power users likely already have something like VMware or Xen in their environment. That’s not to say that there isn’t value both for the dev team and users for a docker container.

I would lean toward Debian personally especially with some of the SQL idiosyncrasies with Ubuntu. Though I could see the value in going Ubuntu given how popular it is with the current user base.

@george1421 @Wayne-Workman

We use Ubuntu where I am (US K12) I manage updates via Landscape which as worked out pretty well for us. Mind you our Linux footprint is much smaller than our Windows Server footprint.

I would definitely be behind a Debian based Appliance and would be willing to seed from home as well. I had to cut my speed from gig to 200/200 for reasons, but still enough to be helpful.

The biggest wrinkle would be scripting the first startup to ask the appropriate questions and making the appropriate changes (disk size, Database PW, network interface, IP, Hostname, generate Certs(SSL Should be a default on an appliance), etc.)

@quazz

I don’t expect to see a lot of fundamental functional differences for the most part. I do expect to see people shift away from it if only for the optics of where it is placed in the development pipeline (somewhere between Fedora and RHEL) and not wanting to be out ahead of the mainline.

@george1421

I’ve typically only used VMWare, Xen/XCP-ng/CitrixHypervisor and Virtualbox all of which import OVF and OVA files. Not sure if KVM based hosts or HyperV can pull that off, but I would be surprised if they couldn’t.

We don’t currently use docker in our environment so I can’t speak to the benefits or pitfalls of that approach.

I would be interested in seeing how those demographics shift over the next year with the changes from CentOS to CentOS Stream. (https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/) I am moving my one CentOS host to Oracle Linux, but others may stick with stream, fedora or cough up the money for RHEL depending on their structure.

I can’t seem to find it, but I recall reading a thread (this could have been months ago, time is weird at the moment) that was discussing cutting down the number of distros supported by the installer.

My though process expanded from that to eliminating the installer as it exists entirely (at least in the way that it broadly installs on so many distros) and instead provide an official Virtual Appliance.

It would have a LTS base OS of some type (Debian, Ubuntu LTS, or Oracle Linux probably - I would have included CentOS as the front runner but IBMs changes to that make it not an option really). Make the VM and compress it down, then have it be expandable to the available storage, probably with some type of interaction on first boot to handle those tasks automatically like an LVM expand, default password change etc, possibly even a choice for making the VM a storage node.

This would be a big lift obviously, but the simplification of support would be a big win when everyone starts from a common base.

Thoughts?

@Sebastian-Roth

Now that I have the necessary MAC addresses at least associated with the machine I am good for now. I will wait for a final release before I move. This isn’t a deal breaker kind of issue for me.

@Sebastian-Roth

The Mac shows up in the table. Assigned to my device, but under pending. So I went to pending and approved the Mac addresses. Though when I went back and tried to remove the temporary Mac that is in the primary field and move the built in MAC address to the primary field but it still gives the error when I save that the Mac is already assigned (to the machine who’s page I’m on).

There are 3 Mac addresses in the mix.

1. The temporary usb adapter
2. another USB adapter that the user usually has. This one doesn’t support PXE hence the temp adapter.
3. The Wifi Mac that I keep as a secondary because we use the client and I want the machine to still check in while on Wifi.

Running FOG 1.5.8 on Ubuntu 18.04

Removed a Mac address from a machine so I could use a usb network adapter to image it. When I went to put the built in Wifi MAC address back into the machine config it says that it is already in use, but it is no longer on that machine’s entry or in use anywhere else.