Posts made by Derek Newbold

@Quazz we use VMware ESXi as our virtualization software.

I’ve also had a look at the running processes and it says php-fpm7.1

Actually maybe I’ll try out Centos!

Also I should mention that our slowness issue seems to still happen even after hours when the majority of our client computers would be turned off.

Thanks @george1421

I think I will stick to Ubuntu 18.04 then as I’m used to that and not that familiar with linux in general.

So are you saying that our current version of 1.5.4 should not be running slow? We are seeing weird issues where it will take awhile to complete things such as updating details on a host (client computer). When you click the update button it can take up to 20-30 seconds sometimes for it to bring up the green box saying its completed. There are other random slowness issues but this is the most prevalent. I’ve tried bumping the VM up to 4 vCPU’s and 12GB of RAM but it doesn’t seem to make any difference. I’ve also tried to tweak MySQL settings for better performance, but again doesn’t seem to make a difference (although my knowledge on this is limited). Watching the CPU usage it seems like the VM is being taxed pretty hard most of the time which doesn’t seem right.

We have probably about 400 to 500 client computers that could be contacting FOG, but generally not all of them would be turned on at the same time. The current client check in time is set to 5 minutes in the FOG Client settings in the FOG web interface. We also did not have any slowness issues prior to upgrading to 1.5.4 so it seems related to that version or something that has changed since older versions (perhaps the new UI interface as you suggested). Any tips around preventing this slowness issue other than adjusting FOG client check in times which I would prefer not to adjust if possible?

Hi All,

I would like to do a fresh/updated OS install of the VM that we are using to run FOG and at the same time upgrade FOG to the latest version as we are having some issues with slowness of the FOG interface that we haven’t been able to get to the bottom of (I believe it is a sql based issue). I’m not entirely sure on the steps I should follow to do this and whether it is not a good idea to move and upgrade FOG both at the same time? Some of the Wiki guides are not up to date so thought I would ask on here if anyone could give a quick rundown on the process I should use please? I’m also unsure on what the recommended OS is these days, I believe Ubuntu is no longer recommended?

Current OS: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Current FOG version: 1.5.4

Future OS: (Suggestions on best OS please?)
Future FOG version: 1.5.7

My current plan is to do something like this below, but I’m unsure if this process is correct and what the actual steps are:

1. Backup all necessary FOG related files (images, snap ins, sql database etc)
2. Snapshot VM as a backup.
3. Format VM and install new OS.
4. Install FOG.
5. Restore FOG related files from previous install.
6. Remove VM snapshot once new install is working well.

Thankyou for any help you can provide!

Thankyou @george1421 for the prompt reply and information!

Unfortunately we do not have direct access to our router and internet firewall/proxy so it makes it difficult to test and setup this kind of arrangement, or even to be aware of what ports/protocols are allowed. This means it will probably be trial and error for me trying to implement this FOG storage node.

I just have some further questions to clarify your answers if you don’t mind?

1. Do you happen to know what ports mysql, http and ftp would be running over. I believe our routers are probably setup to allow access to certain IP ranges and ports rather than protocols as such. Would the ports be mysql 3306, http 80 and ftp 21?

2. Is there a guide I can follow on installing the location plugin and the perhaps even the FOG storage node setup?

3. It may be difficult for me to setup a second network interface with alternate internet access at the off-site campus in this instance, and even if I setup and installed the FOG storage node at the main campus I would still need to use a temporary IP address arrangement and then change the IP once I moved it to the off-site campus. Also how would the FOG installation (and associated software) know which network card to use then? I believe in the past I changed the IP address of a FOG server after installation following some guides or advice from somebody, but I have since lost that information. Is it still possible to do this with the newer versions of FOG? If so, are there any guides I can follow on this?

Thanks again!

Derek

Hi,

I’ve been trying to understand how a FOG storage node works as I’m looking to implement one at a separate off-site campus so that we can image computers and install snap-ins at that campus without requiring the images and snapins to go across their internet/WAN link for each computer.

I’ve read some wiki guides and other forum questions but there are a few things I do not yet understand so I have some questions I’m hoping someone can answer please?

1. As the off-site campus is on a seperate IP range and subnet than the main campus, should this be OK from a FOG perspective? Our routers have rules in place to allow access between the different IP ranges and we can currently access RDP/Shares between campuses etc.

2. How will the computers at the off-site campus know to use the off-site campus storage node to install images and snapins? Do we just point their DHCP server to pxe boot from that storage node, and also point the FOG client on those computers to the IP of the storage node? This is one of the things I’m not clear about.

3. At the off-site campus (and on the main campus) the internet connection firewall/filtering is quite restrictive so it probably won’t allow the installation of FOG through that IP range and internet connection. In the past I have connected the FOG server up to a direct internet connection to install it, but that requires me to have it on a different IP range than what FOG will end up running on. Is it possible to have the Operating System (e.g. Ubuntu) running on a temporary IP address (e.g 192.168.10.1) to allow the FOG installation to work, and then during the FOG install when it asks you for the IP address I could specify what the actual proper IP address will become (e.g. 10.50.240.30)? Would this then setup all the FOG settings and other associated software to run off the proper IP address which I would change the server/Ubuntu install to after installation?

Thankyou for any help you can provide!

Derek

We have ended up rebuilding our image and it is now working OK. It mustn’t have liked something in our old image.

Thanks for your help and suggestions!

@Quazz

Unfortunately we have overwritten the original problematic image with a test image so the ‘cat’ commands won’t be of any use at this stage.

The test images we have been doing appear to be working fine so we are just going to rebuild our image and hope that fixes our issue!

I’ll post back on here if we continue to have this trouble.

Thanks everyone!

@Tom-Elliott we have tried resizing the windows partition to be a lot smaller than the target laptops hard drive, recaptured the image which appears to be all successful during the capture process, didn’t see any errors and it appears to be resizing the partitions OK before capturing. It is still not deploying the image successfully though, comes up with the error about GPT partition tables.

Have tried running “chkdsk /f” on Windows before capturing the image as I believe that fixed an issue I had in the past with images not getting resized correctly. This didn’t make any difference either.

Any images that were captured prior to the FOG upgrade are still deploying OK.

Any further ideas please?

Can you confirm that you successfully downgraded the FOS kernels?

@george1421 Yes, I used these commands to confirmed that it worked when I downloaded them. They both say version 4.15.2. I assume you do not need to restart the FOG server after downloading the new kernels?

is the target drive smaller than the original drive?

@Tom-Elliott Possibly slightly smaller, however it is strange as this image was built for these laptops and it was working before we upgraded FOG and recaptured an updated version of the image. We are also using the “Single Disk - Resizable” option so normally that handles smaller drives as well? Maybe it’s not shrinking the image properly, I think I may have had issues with that in the past but can’t quite remember how we got around it hmm…

I will try resizing the Windows partition of the VM that we are capturing and see if that makes a difference.

Use the built in kernel upgrade tool in FOG Settings -> FOG Kernel to install the down level kernels.

In the past I’ve had issues with the FOG server being able to connect to the internet through our departments firewall/proxy systems. I have managed to get it working this time tho thankfully and have downgraded the kernel!

I have also edited the php values and changed the client check in settings to 300. This has helped the CPU load on the server although it still seems a little high than what we are used too. At least it is a lot more responsive now on the web interface!

We are now having a GPT issue deploying an updated image that was captured after the upgrade (pre-upgrade images seem to deploy fine). I have started a new forum post on this though.

Hi All,

Recently upgraded from FOG 1.4.3 to 1.5.4 and have had a few teething issues.

Since the upgrade we captured an updated copy of an image which seemed to capture fine (although now I think of it, I haven’t watched the final stage of the capture to see if there were any issues).

Upon deploying this image it is failing at the “Restoring Partition Tables (GPT)” stage with an error trying to restore GPT partition tables (see screenshot attached).

Older images are still deploying fine, even to the same laptops that we are testing with.

I have already tried rolling back the FOS kernel from “4.16.6” to “4.15.2” as per some instructions from another forum post I created about a separate issue, however this has not changed anything and I get the error on either version.

Any ideas? Any help you can provide would be much appreciated!

Thanks, Derek

Hi George1421,

I just found the client check in time setting in the “FOG Settings” page, it is set to “60”.

I was also wondering if you meant “FOG kernel” rather than “FOS”? If so, I believe I understand how to do this by just swapping the “bzImage” and “bzImage32” files out in the following directory?
“/var/www/fog/service/ipxe/”

If this is correct, could you just please point me to the best location to source the kernels from these days?

Thankyou,

Derek

Thankyou george1421 for your reply!

Do you have any instructions/guidance around rolling back the FOS kernel? I’m not familiar with this process and don’t want to break anything. My knowledge on linux/ubuntu systems is limited as I only use it to run FOG. We just tried to image a laptop and it seems to have got stuck at the GPT section so I’m guessing this is the issue you mentioned?

I have found a “www.conf” file in the following path, would this be the right one to edit?
“/etc/php/7.1/fpm/pool.d/www.conf”

As far as clients communicating. We have about 600 devices on the network that could potentially be communicating with the FOG server if they were all turned on at once. I have not had any issues with this in the past.

I am unsure what the client check in time is, where would I find that setting as I have had a bit of a look around and can’t see anything? I don’t believe I’ve ever changed a setting like that so it is still probably the default check in time value.

Thinking about the client though, I have not touched/updated the client on our devices since upgrading to FOG 1.5.4, could this potentially be an issue? I checked one of the “fog.log” files on a client and it looks like it is communicating every couple of minutes according to the time stamps in the log.

Hi All,

I recently updated FOG from 1.4.3 to 1.5.4 and since the update the CPU usage on the Ubuntu (16.04 LTS) VM it is installed on has gone through the roof and it is affecting the performance of FOG and the web interface! It never had any issues before hand so I’m not sure what has gone wrong?

I have tried throwing more resources at it e.g. went from one vCPU to two, and also from 4GB of RAM to 12GB. The extra CPU has improved the responsiveness of the FOG web interface but CPU usage is still way too high it seems.

A restart of the Ubuntu VM has not fixed the issue either. There are no active tasks showing in FOG, and we only use it for imaging devices, no scheduled tasks or anything like that.

I have looked at the ‘top’ command and it appears that “mysql” and “www-data” are using the most.

Any ideas what could be wrong?

Thankyou,

Derek

Hi,

We are looking to purchase some Dell Latitude 3180 laptops that do not have inbuilt NIC’s. We have a trial of the device and they also sent a Dell USB NIC that supports PXE boot. From our testing the MAC address recognised by FOG unfortunately comes from the USB which means it will follow the USB NIC rather than the laptop itself. Dell are now doing a USB-C device that allows MAC address passthrough which would hopefully resolve this type of issue, however these particular devices that we are going to purchase do not have that option.

I’ve thought of setting up dummy hosts based on the MAC address of the USB NIC’s and then if we want to reimage something then just grab a USB NIC and tell that one in FOG to reimage. However what happens then when we want the device to boot up into Windows and to rename and join the domain? How will the FOG client reference the machine once the USB NIC is removed? I thought it might be able to reference it by Wireless MAC address however to join our wireless the laptop needs to be a part of the domain and to be already named correctly etc.

I’m wondering if anyone could explain a simple step by step solution of the best process for imaging with USB NIC’s? I’ve tried to read some other forum posts however the results weren’t overly clear to me.

Any help would be much appreciated!

FOG Version: 1.4.3
SVN Revision: 6075

Thanks,

Derek

@sebastian-roth I finally got around to trying this out the other day and after running a check disk and recapturing the image it is now resizing the partitions correctly upon deployment. I didn’t have to modify the ‘d1.fixed_size_partitions’ again so I’m assuming that the capture process either worked correctly after running check disk, or else it just continued to use my modified version of that file.

Thanks for your help in resolving this issue everyone, much appreciated!

Hi Sebastian,

Thankyou for your reply. This makes sense to me, I have checked the partitions and the ‘C:’ partition has the label ‘Boot’ so I assume that is why it is being detected as not resizable (see screenshot below). Would it be advisable to try and change the boot partition to be on the ‘System Reserved’ partition instead if possible? Or just continue with the manual fix that you mentioned?

Also I tried manually changing ‘d1.fixed_size_partitions’ to just have ‘1’ and then reimaged a host, this time it tried to resize the ‘sda2’ partition however it failed and came up with ‘Cluster accounting failed’ errors and that ‘NTFS is inconsistent. Run chkdsk /f’. Do you have any advice on what might cause this and how I can stop it from happening? Again, I had no problems with the old version of FOG doing the same processes so I’m unsure what is causing these issues.

Thankyou again,

Derek

@Tom-Elliott I think I had that in my previous post? However I’ll post it here again for you, I assume this is what you are after? To me it looks like it shouldn’t have the ‘:2’ in it however I’m not sure how to fix that?

administrator@NHS-FOG-01:/images$ cat /images/ADOBEIMAGEWIN7/d1.fixed_size_partitions
:1:2

@Tom-Elliott Sorry my technical knowledge on this is limited. I usually take a VM snapshot of the image before capturing so that I can revert to the snapshot if I want to make further changes and then snapshot/sysprep/capture it again. Due to this process as far as I know the VM should not be in a “broken” state.

It was all working with this image up until the latest capture which I done after upgrading FOG. Maybe something broke in the last capture, would you like me to go through the process to capture it again and take some screenshots?

I don’t mind if it doesn’t shrink the image any further as I’ve made it smaller than any of our HDD’s in our hosts, all I need it to do is to expand the image to use all the disk space of the destination host like it used to.