Posts made by Chuck Syperski

Sorry for the outages, there was a nasty little misconfiguration that caused random database segfaults. I believe it has been resolved and things should be smoother from here.

[quote=“Tom Elliott, post: 21083, member: 7271”]With this change, did the database that keeps track of who’s registered to send notification get wiped? I only ask because now the fog login pages state: Estimated FOG sites: No database selected.

Thank you,[/quote]

Permissions were incorrect, this should be fixed now.

All done

[SIZE=12px][FONT=Verdana][COLOR=#494949]FOG Project will be offline for up to a few hours as we migrate to a new VPS provider on December 28th around 10:00pm CST. This will affect the main site, wiki and forum. Thanks for your understanding.[/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE]

[quote=“The Dealman, post: 13190, member: 53”][COLOR=#0000ff][SIZE=4]Here’s my 2 cents…i think all those extra tools [FONT=Arial] like file recovery, testdisk, and password reset should be add-on’s that are available for download sort of like those other kernels that are out there. [/FONT][FONT=Arial] It’s cheaper to replace hard drives than to purchase a imaging solution but hard drive support (advance format & SSD) has to be a goal, i’ve been able to mung a solution together a for those pesky advance format drives but it’s not 100% so i have to replace the drives i can’t image. The security goals are nice but i don’t think they are a necessity, a nice to have item for me would be a better way to do snap-ins. If i had that it would reduce the size of images by far ![/FONT][/SIZE][/COLOR][/quote]

Thanks for the input regarding snap-ins!

[SIZE=15px][FONT=Arial][COLOR=#000000]Hello everyone, [/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE]
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[COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial][SIZE=15px]So it has been a while since we have released anything any FOG updates and many of your are wondering what’s going on, so I thought an update was in order. [/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]
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[COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial][SIZE=15px]Like many of you, my time has become constrained so the amount of time I have been able to dedicate to version 0.33 has been less than it should be. Peter Gilchrist did an awesome job filling in and helping out with getting the UI closer to where it should be. What we have been stuck on for a little while has been EFI/GPT support, which is important with Windows 8 and modern PCs. Much of this has been an issue with a lack of hardware to effectively test on. There is a little bit more UI work that needs to be done before we can release 0.33, but the biggest issue has been EFI, so if anyone is knowledgeable in this area and would like to help us out we would be grateful! Once we tackle EFI, we should be able to release soon afterwards. [/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]
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[COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial][SIZE=15px]FOG has a couple issues that have been ignored and not really addressed. I am talking about the issues with security, feature bloat, coupling of systems, and an aging code-base. [/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]
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[COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial][SIZE=15px]In terms of security, there are a number of issues that need to be addressed. One obvious issue is the fact that anyone can mount the NFS volumes, as they don’t use authentication. There are numerous other issues as well including the “service” scripts not using any authentication either which is problematic. [/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]
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[COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial][SIZE=15px]FOG initially grew quickly in terms of features to it own detriment. I believe we have a number of features that should not be included in the core release of FOG as they are becoming difficult to maintain. A few of these that come to mind include ClamAV and many of the advanced tasks like file recovery, testdisk, and password reset. Many of the features within the Windows service are no longer functional with Windows 7 and up, but I will discuss the Windows service in more detail later. [/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]
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[COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial][SIZE=15px]FOG relies on many operating system specific features, which I believe it no longer has to. FOG is tightly coupled with tftpd, nfs, and to a lesser degree isc dhcp server. This makes it difficult for FOG to run on other operating systems like Windows or even other Linux distributions. It also makes FOG fragile to changes in the underlying systems, often when a new Ubuntu LTS is released something breaks with FOG. [/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]
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[COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial][SIZE=15px]Lastly, the thing that has been bothering me for a while is the aging code-base. The code was poorly written in the first place and we have just kept adding to it. Peter has helped clean up the code, but in my opinion we are still putting lipstick on a pig. [/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]
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[COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial][SIZE=15px]So here is what I would like to see. First off, I would like to get some community help with EFI/GPT, and get 0.33 out the door. No surprises here.[/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]
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[COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial][SIZE=15px]Then I would like to change things up a bit. I would like to form two or three teams, one that would maintain the UI, and at minimum another to maintain the Linux init image and kernel. I would like to then either discontinue the Windows service (since we can change the hostname via the init image now) or move it to another team.[/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]
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[COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial][SIZE=15px]After this I would like to throw away the currently version of FOG and do a rewrite, it is about that time. As part of the rewrite here are my goals:[/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]
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[][COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial][SIZE=15px][COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial][SIZE=15px]Write a custom tftp server into the server. This will allow for improved security, less dependence on the underlying OS, and potential for scaling out more easily. [/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR][/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]
[][COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial][SIZE=15px][COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial][SIZE=15px]Drop NFS and replace it with HTTP. This will improve security and cut the dependence on the underlying OS. [/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR][/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]
[][COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial][SIZE=15px][COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial][SIZE=15px]Make FOG run on any OS. [/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR][/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]
[][COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial][SIZE=15px][COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial][SIZE=15px]Move services like ImageReplicationService and Multicast service into the core context. This also helps reduce the dependence on the underlying OS. [/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR][/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]
[][COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial][SIZE=15px][COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial][SIZE=15px]Improve security in general, https out of the box, only serve images that have active tasks, etc. [/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR][/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]
[][COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial][SIZE=15px][COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial][SIZE=15px]Pair down the feature set to something more manageable. [/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR][/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]
[*][COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial][SIZE=15px][COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial][SIZE=15px](Here comes the controversial change, get ready…) Move away from PHP. I don’t do much work in PHP any longer, I don’t want to start a flame war, but there are somethings I love about PHP (ie: it’s a psuedo functional language and FP is good.) but there are also things that I really don’t like about PHP, and those I won’t go into here. I would prefer to rewrite the FOG front-end is a statically typed language like Scala with Play2 potential or even Java (I know I said a bad word). [/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR][/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]
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[COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial][SIZE=15px]With all this being said, the next thing that needs to get done is support for EFI/GPT as Windows 8 and current PCs pretty much make this a requirement. If we can figure out EFI, I think we can get things back on track. So my questions to the community are do you think we can build the teams I described? Do you know anyone that would be interested in working on the init/kernel side of things? Any other general thoughts, suggestions? [/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]

We moved the FOG site to a new VPS today so there was a brief outage around 10am CST. All services should now be restored.

Thanks

Great to hear! Let us know how your conversion goes.

Hmm, before uploading an image can you take a look at your hard drive and confirm that you don’t have any other partitions present that may be confusing the MBR? To do this, boot up in ‘Client System Information’ from the boot menu (I think that is the title). Then select the option to display the partition information. Confirm that you only have a single partition.

My thought is that it might not be worth the time. In a short period of time the same information will be populated in this forum. I am of the mindset of just starting clean. If we were able to put the old forum in RO mode, then that would be a good stop guess measure.

The problem is that sf doesn’t support (as far as I can tell) putting a forum is read-only mode. We understand that we are burning a lot of information, but I think it will be better in the long term to prevent fragmentation and user confusion.

We used the non default port range so we could support a large number of concurrent multicasts (50+) without running into known used ports.

[media=youtube]69gJvHjTKNQ[/media]

Take a look at this.

Great job Blackout!

If you are running 0.30, you will need to run FOGPrep.exe before uploading the image, is that something that you did?

I would second Zabbix