Posts made by Data31337

@ITSolutions

Yup that is my current method so far, but if I were to do that, then my images would easily run past 40 GBs. Which is why I copy it to the mounted drive, then hop over with File Explorer and Cut/Paste it into a “Archived Folder” I have linked. Essentially the same thing just a bit more confusing than just being able write to the mounted drive. When I replace the drive locally, I’ll report back with the results and maybe we can figure something out thats not as step-intensive.

If you want a complete list of steps that I do, it goes:
Instructions dependant on cifs-utils package

1. Login to the Ubuntu
2. Navigate to the /images folder (cd <folder path>)
3. Delete any old images being used (rm –r <dirname>)
4. Pull Needed image from Archive Directory from the external drive (Copy + Paste to NetworkImages)
5. Navigate to the NetworkImages Directory
6. Copy the image you want to use (cp –r <dirname>)
7. Set the permissions for everyone to read/write/execute (chmod 777 <dirname)
8. Review the folder contents using ls –l and make sure its highlighted green
9. Set task in FOG using correct image
10. Profit

I know this seems like a lot of work, but it really isn’t. Still takes less time than manually running to each PC and plugging my USB in and entering needed commands. With this, can run 10 PCs to a switch and image them all at the same time, which is exactly what we need because we build 10 - 15 PCs every quarter and in the start, there wasn’t ANY imaging solution. I had to build each OS by hand.

@ITSolutions

Its currently mounted through the /images/external folder, but when I tried testing it out, it was mounted directly to the /images folder. The issue was that when I tried running

blkid

command it wouldn’t return a UUID for the external drive I was trying to use. What I’m going to do is probably try remounting the external drive locally as opposed to being on the network and then give the method another try. I think I understand the concept of what were trying to do, but it won’t do it with a network mounted drive (Because it won’t return a UUID while being connected to a separate server, unless there is another way of obtaining the UUID). Also too, I’m not sure if this would take care of the permissions problem that comes with the solution as well.

@ITSolutions

UPDATE I tried doing

Next you need the UUID of the drive
-Go to a terminal and type sudo blkid and find the dev for your external drive and copy/make note of the UUID.
-Then sudo nano /etc/fstab and add the following line tot he end of it:
UUID=(Copy the UUID of your drive) /images ext4 nofail,auto,noatime,rw,user 0 0

Which ended up failing due to the fact the Network Drive didn’t produce a UUID sadly. I’m not experienced enough with Linux to know of any work around either. But thanks again for the idea.

@ITSolutions

The file system is NTFS. The issue I was running into is the Permissions. Everytime I transfer a image to the external storage drive, it would reset the permissions to drwxr-xr-x when I noticed it needed to be read/write/executable by everyone. I originally thought it was a issue with “Sticky Bits” Permissions but it wasn’t. It was just that the NTFS drive isn’t setup with the 777 permissions and when it mounted, it carried its permissions over.

@ITSolutions

Ill try it and respond with what I find. thanks again!

@ITSolutions

Thanks a lot! I think this is exactly what I’m looking for.

Do you know if this will this work for a Networked External Drive that’s currently plugged into a different server?

@Wayne-Workman

I know but its not much of a option for me because we’re a Medium size shop and not a big fan of random towers just sitting everywhere. Also, we have it hosted with 3 other servers with very limited drives since our last array broke due to a controller battery, so just making due with what we have.

[edit] Trust me, after the array gets fixed, thats one of things I plan on doing is ripping out the old fog server and building a new one. [/edit]

@george1421

I have found a work around to do what I needed. Instead of having a active storage node, you can set a folder inside the /images folder that is mounted. You have to remember that, you cannot export images to that folder, but what you can do is copy the images to it. So instead of imaging/cloning directly to it, copy the image to it. Then if you want to retrieve your image, navigate to it and copy it back. Be sure to reset the permissions after you move it back. I have done this successfully with several images, using a 1.5 TB external drive mounted to a folder inside the /images folder. I’m only doing this due to the limited HD Space on my FOG server.

You’ve answered my question, but let me explain a bit clearer.

Ok, so I have a 40 Gbs VM Machine, but (now that I’m thinking about it maybe better to run 5 or 6 Older HDs into a RAID 1) I want to be able store more images. We have a 1.5 TB external storage device but I can’t seem to figure out how to get Ubuntu to map to it successfully and store my images there.

It doesn’t matter what is hosting a share, fog cannot re-export it, Linux cannot re-export it.

Basically explains it, I can’t do it either way because Linux or FOG cannot re-export the images from the networked drive.

The thing is, we don’t have the space for a second VM box on the host that we’re using. Would I be able to setup a storage node on the same box as my normal server is on and mount the network drive to it?

FOG Revision: 7945
Ubuntu: 14.04

After finally getting FOG up and running we were testing it with various images, XP & 7 in particular, and ran into a disk space error. We only had the server allocated for 40Gbs but it was working fine til we tried to image the 7 machine. Long story short it kept dropping out on us (with the disk space memory low, please cancel or allocate more.) I cancelled the task but it ended up corrupting my machine all together. I uninstalled FOG and it said there was only 2.8Gbs out of 37Gbs used but it still kept prompting me with the error.

My question is, is it possible to store the images in a separate location but still only use the master node to distribute them? We have plenty of space to run the images, its just located somewhere else on the network. I was looking in the FOG wiki, and it said something about Storage nodes to help distribute images, but we aren’t wanting extra nodes to help distribute, we just want to use another memory location to store the images.

@george1421

Oh, my mistake, it was a administrator error, it was in the installation text when configuring the ./installfog.sh in the beginning, I didn’t read through the updated DNS steps, and left it to the previous DNS setup. I just ran through it again trying to find the step and it looks like its been corrected.

@george1421

It was in one of the old installer files, before I upgraded to trunk (Possibly in 1.2.0, or 0.32 which were the only 2 older generations I had installed along with older wiki page).

Please everyone take my up-votes you guys have been amazing help while working through this!

@Sebastian-Roth

Haazah! You were correct. I reset the setting and it boots to registration and doesn’t get hung up!

Again, I appreciate all your hard work in figuring this out and helping me out!

@Sebastian-Roth

We have DHCP setup on a Server 2008 R2 VM along with ADDS if that helps. And then you were also correct with the USB Error, I had a USB Stick with the FOG client on it that was still plugged in. I think it was getting the error because it wasn’t recognizing it.

[edit] DHCP is pushing out the pxelinux.0 [/edit]

@Sebastian-Roth

Sorry if this is a dumb question but how can I find out? Is there a log file I can check to see which one is getting pushed out? Configuration wise, I haven’t changed anything.

[edit] I am able to get to the FOG Menu once again, where as last changes I was not able to, but when I select anything it displays the same Kernel panic - not syncing error, along with device descriptor read/64, error -71 [/edit]

No problem, I was following the other thread and noticed he got it working using the dnsmasq. Would this be something recommended to try out? As of right now its just a fully updated WebUI/svn/FOG and my experience with dnsmasq isn’t the greatest but I can learn.

I’ve been following the other thread too, I noticed we are both trying to image the same style PC the Optiplex 745. One thing I noticed was that FOG is pushing out a 64 Bit version of BZImage & Init when I know the PC’s Ive been trying to image are 32 bit. I tried modifying the kernel’s in the configuration to push the 32 bit and I recieved a “Image not found” written over several different lines, I can get a exact error message if that would be more helpful.

No, not to my knowledge, just DHCP and DNS on a Win 2008 R2 machine.

I think I forgot to add some details to the issue:
SVN: Updated to 5585
FOG: Revision 7881
Machines to be imaged: Dell Optiplex 745; HP DC5750S Small Form Factor