Posts made by chad-bisd

another neat trick I learned is that if you try to execute a really long and complicated command and it gives you access denied because it needs sudo, you can just type[CODE]sudo !![/CODE] and it will execute the previous command with sudo.

Faster server disk subsystem usually equals faster unicast deployment to multiple clients. I use an old Dell server that has 5 disks in RAID5 array. I can image 15 clients at about 3GB per minute per client, or I can image over 30 tablets that only have 100Mbps interfaces, and get about 900 MiB per minute per client.

When I was using an old desktop with a single 7200 RPM SATA drive it in, imaging more than 2 clients at a time slowed everything down due to the non sequential disk read requests. RAID5 makes it better, as does a RAID controller with built in cache.

The “bit”-ness of the client OS shouldn’t have any effect on the upload. There is probably something else going on here. What image type are you specifying: Single partition -resizable, Multiple Partition - Single Disk, etc?

Do you have a router address in your config? It might be wrong for subnets other than the one shared with the server. Try removing the router information from your config. I use FOG with multiple subnets and I do not supply a router address when I setup FOG.

You can look into recovering a mysql database. There may be a way to remount the tables so you can export the data.

have you tried searching the internet for the error message to see what the problem might be or what steps you can take to find out more information. I image over 300 tablets with SSD drives in them without issue using an older 2.6.38 kernel.

My suggestion is for you to look into running ProxyDHCP instead of trying to run two NIC’s in separate subnets (unless you are familiar with routing).

ProxyDHCP lets your normal DHCP server still handle giving out and managing IP addresses and leases. What it listen for DHCP requests that are from clients that understand PXE, and it responds to the clients saying something along the lines of “I know you’re getting your IP address from another server, but here is what you need in order to PXEBoot.”

If you want to look into ProxyDHCP, I can help you set it up. If not, continue reading for my thoughts on your current network configuration:

You are not giving your pxe boot clients a proper gateway/router address to forward traffic to if it’s not intended for the local subnet (10.143.1.0/24).

So basically, if the IP address of the other computer it wants to talk to is in the 10.143.1.x range, it can talk to it, but it has no idea where to send traffic for the rest of the network or internet.

I don’t see where you’re giving it a route/gateway to use. I think it would be 10.143.1.1 since that is the only device on that subnet that is connected to the rest of the world. You’ll probably need to run pf or other routing package to do that though.

I’m no Cisco guy, but have you tried looking at [url]http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/security/ise/1.1/user_guide/ise_sw_cnfg.pdf[/url], specifically the sections on PXE and TFTP?

I think the only “plug-in” for FOG right now is Capone.

I’m pretty sure when the next version of FOG comes out, this will be fixed because it’s a pretty big code rewrite. For now, just change the code and replace the calls to the functions that are using referenced variables. There are several posts showing what to change and out. I think what you’re looking for is &$tmp

Does FOG handle your DHCP requests? Do you use ProxyDHCP?

Just be sure to filter to TFTP and DHCP traffic. I think I had to make a custom filter in WireShark to capture both at the same time. Just turn on wireshark with the filter, start your client for PXE boot, wait for it to error/bypass pxe boot, and stop wireshark.

In the log, you’ll see the client do a dhcprequest broadcast, the server response, the client confirm, and the server confirm. The first server response should include the IP address, subnet mask, gateway, and next-server + filename info. Shortly after the dhcpack from the server, you should see a TFTP request from the client to the FOG server.

You are looking for the break down in pxe boot process. Is it failing on the dhcp request or when it tries to get the default boot menu file via tftp.

At this point I would use WireShark and mirror the port so I could watch the network traffic between the DHCP/TFTP server(s) and the tablet. You’ll want to filter to dhcp and tftp protocols.

Does RAID 0+1 have better read speeds than RAID5? The majority of the work will be read, so pick the fastest disk organization that also has redundancy.

Will you primarily be multicasting or unicasting?

Do you have any experience with Jumbo frames so you have a working knowledge?

How much free time do you have to learn all this new stuff or do you need to have a working system asap?

OK. The starting PXE over IPv4 is good. Does it … and then give up, or does it ever get an IP address?

I got a meraki t-shirt from the TCEA Sysadmin and Tech support conference last year. Meraki seems like a really neat company and their products are impressive. We were already in the migration from Juniper/Trapeze to Aerohive though, so I didn’t get any free AP’s.

By the way, Aerohive has some good AP’s and they are cloud managed also with the option to host your own management server if you want.

Can anyone post some screen caps or pics of the bios network boot settings, the screen where you would expect PXE boot to being, and any errors that are showing up?

At this point I’m confused about where the error occurs. Do you even get an IP when PXE booting? Do you get the FOG menu? Need more info.

I had to learn how to compile a kernel and update driver files when we purchased 300 Acer Iconia w500p tablets. They would not pxeboot using options 66 and 67 if the dhcp server was a different server than the pxeboot server. If FOG was doing DHCP and pxe/tftp then I could PXE boot. If Windows was DHCP and FOG was pxe/tftp, it would hang. 800 other laptops worked fine, but these tablets and 1 other model of laptops would not PXE boot.

I had to implement ProxyDHCP to get my tablets to even PXE boot to the menu, then compile a new kernel with some graphics options disabled to keep the screen from going snowy, and updated drivers for the usb-rj45 lan card built into the docking keyboard to get the NIC working with FOG.

Compatibility check is inside the client system information task from the pxe boot menu. I don’t know if you’ll be able to get there since the kernel can’t finish loading. These are not secure-boot enabled are they? Is the BIOS set to legacy bios or EUFI?

I wouldn’t be opposed to letting users put in a primary user, other tag 1, and other tag 2. I get frustrated sometimes when I can’t put this in through the webUI because an inventory job has not been run yet, either as a separate job, or as part of the registration process.

This could be as simple as displaying the labels and blanks and update button even if no related record exists in the inventory table.