Introduction

First I have to say this article contains the results of many brilliant people and is not my content. I’m only assembling this information into a consistent document instead of spread around buried in posts and responses. My intent is to not dig into the details behind the scripts or how to tweak them for your needs. You can read the links below to figure out why things are being done the way they are. I wanted to create a tutorial that was as close to a cut and paste to get driver injection going in your environment. Now I will primarily focus on Dell hardware for the main reason that Dell does supply driver archive files (known as .CABs) that can be downloaded and extracted quickly to create the driver structure. I’m sure that HP, Lenovo, and others have similar driver packs.

You can download the Dell driver cabs for your hardware from here: http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/enterprise-client/w/wiki/2065.dell-command-deploy-driver-packs-for-enterprise-client-os-deployment

Reference links:
https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/4278/utilizing-postscripts-rename-joindomain-drivers-snapins
https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/7740/the-magical-mystical-fog-post-download-script-under-construction
https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/7740/the-magical-mystical-fog-post-download-script
https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/8878/fog-drivers-script-will-not-run-correctly-in-postdownloadscripts/46

In this series if posts I plan on outlining what the FOG post download script is, what its about, and how to use it to your advantage with image deployment.

I’ve debated with myself if another post was needed since Lee https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/4278/utilizing-postscripts-rename-joindomain-drivers-snapins and I https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/7391/deploying-a-single-golden-image-to-different-hardware-with-fog have written tutorial about them in the past.

Where I want to explore with this series of posts is more about the background behind its function and to cover some of the script elements from Lee’s and my previously linked tutorials.

First of all lets get a little background here and some terminology defined. The FOG image deployment system consists of three main components:

1. The FOG management environment. The FOG management environment is the FOG server itself, which is responsible for planning, scheduling, instructing and documenting the image deployment.
2. The FOS (FOG OS) target engine {need better name here}. The FOS target engine, or FOS (as it will be known in this document) is responsible for capturing and deploying images from the defined storage node, as well as other actions on the target computer. FOS is actually an FOG Project created high performance linux operating system that was specifically constructed to image target computers. We have to remember for the rest of the tutorial, FOS is a linux based operating system that is used to deploy any OS image to your target computer.
3. FOG Client. This is an add on utility service for windows and linux, which is installed on the final or target OS. The FOG Client queries the FOG server for instructions and actions. I’m not planning on discussing the FOG client during this tutorial since it is out of scope in regards to post installation scripting.

The FOG Post install scripts give FOG system admins the ability to inject actions in the image creation process. To allow this custom scripts to run the developers added an external call into the image deployment sequence. Just after the image is placed on the target computer’s storage device, the FOG server calls a script in the /images/postdownloadscripts directory (on the FOG server). That script is called fog.postdownload. The fog.postdownload script is created when the FOG Server is installed. In its default state the script doesn’t do anything much. It is just a place holder to call your custom post install scripts. As I mentioned the fog deployment process calls this fog.postdownload bash script just after the image is placed on the target computer’s storage device. Once all of the external post install scripts have completed the FOG server completes the imaging and data recording steps.

While the post install scripts are stored on the FOG server in the /images/postinstall directory, they are executed by FOS running on the target host. So you have to remember when writing your post install scripts, they execute from the perspective of the target host. The post install scripts have limited access to resources on the FOG server (outside of the /images directory), but have full access to the target host. As noted above, these scripts run on a linux OS, so any resource (programs) available to linux operating systems can be run against the target host. I want to make this distinction to make it clear that FOS is linux and not MS Windows based. So you can not run MS Windows based applications, like DISM, in your post install script. FOS and linux is very powerful, but also limiting in some ways. As long as you are aware that MS Windows based applications can not run in a post install script then you should have little trouble. There are some cross over applications that are compiled for both MS Windows and linux, you just need to ensure you have the correct application for the OS and architecture (IA32 or X64).

Use dnsmasq on the fog server to supply the pxe boot information.

The quick steps are this.

1. Remove the pxe boot information from your router.
2. Install dnsmasq service from your linux distribution’s repo
3. Make sure its at least version 2.76 by issuing this command at the fog server’s linux command prompt sudo dnsmasq -v The version needs to be 2.76 or later.
4. Create a configuration file called ltsp.conf in /etc/dnsmasq.d directory.
5. Paste this content into that file.

# Don't function as a DNS server:
port=0

# Log lots of extra information about DHCP transactions.
log-dhcp

# Set the root directory for files available via FTP.
tftp-root=/tftpboot

# The boot filename, Server name, Server Ip Address
dhcp-boot=undionly.kpxe,,<fog_server_IP>

# Disable re-use of the DHCP servername and filename fields as extra
# option space. That's to avoid confusing some old or broken DHCP clients.
dhcp-no-override

# inspect the vendor class string and match the text to set the tag
dhcp-vendorclass=BIOS,PXEClient:Arch:00000
dhcp-vendorclass=UEFI32,PXEClient:Arch:00006
dhcp-vendorclass=UEFI,PXEClient:Arch:00007
dhcp-vendorclass=UEFI64,PXEClient:Arch:00009

# Set the boot file name based on the matching tag from the vendor class (above)
dhcp-boot=net:UEFI32,i386-efi/ipxe.efi,,<fog_server_IP>
dhcp-boot=net:UEFI,ipxe.efi,,<fog_server_IP>
dhcp-boot=net:UEFI64,ipxe.efi,,<fog_server_IP>

# PXE menu.  The first part is the text displayed to the user.  The second is the timeout, in seconds.
pxe-prompt="Booting FOG Client", 1

# The known types are x86PC, PC98, IA64_EFI, Alpha, Arc_x86,
# Intel_Lean_Client, IA32_EFI, BC_EFI, Xscale_EFI and X86-64_EFI
# This option is first and will be the default if there is no input from the user.
pxe-service=X86PC, "Boot to FOG", undionly.kpxe
pxe-service=X86-64_EFI, "Boot to FOG UEFI", ipxe.efi
pxe-service=BC_EFI, "Boot to FOG UEFI PXE-BC", ipxe.efi

dhcp-range=<fog_server_IP>,proxy

6. Be sure to replace <fog_server_ip> exactly with the IP address of your fog server. Be aware that <fog_server_ip> appears multiple times in the config file.
7. Save and exit your text edit.
8. Issue the following command to restart dnsmasq service sudo systemctl restart dnsmasq
9. Ensure that dnsmasq service is running in memory by issuing this command ps aux|grep dnsmasq. You should see more than one line in the response. If its running then go to step 10.
10. Ensure that dnsmasq starts when the system is rebooting with sudo systemctl enable dnsmasq
11. PXE boot a target computer.

NOTE: If you are supporting multiple foreign subnets (not on the same subnet as your dnsmasq server, you will need to add additional with dhcp-range statements that properly describe that foreign network segment. If you fail to do this the dnsmasq server will not respond to the request from your dhcp-relay service an example of what is needed is below:

dhcp-range=<fog_server_IP>,proxy
dhcp-range=192.168.100.0,proxy,255.255.255.0
dhcp-range=172.16.45.0,proxy,255.255.255.0

Dhcp option 93 to hardware type table

DHCP option 93 Client architecture|
0 Standard PC BIOS
6 32-bit x86 EFI
7 64-bit x86 EFI
9 64-bit x86 EFI (obsolete)
10 32-bit ARM EFI
11 64-bit ARM EFI

The developers found this issue to why the log file grew so big (after almost a year of log file collection). The log file will now be capped at the log file maximum set by the fog configuration settings. This was just a fluke case that caused this file to grow to an abnormal size.

The fix / log file limiting code will be in 1.3.5RC11 when its released.

What you need to understand that the FOS Engine (the customized linux operating system that captures and deployed images on the target computer) is a complete linux OS. It is built with 2 halves. The first part is the the kernel (bzImage) which contains the core linux functions as well as the compiled in device drivers. And the second part is the virtual hard drive (inits) which contains the linux utilities, programs, and fog command scripts. When you PXE boot a target computer into the iPXE menu, certain iPXE menu options will send the bzImage and inits files to the target computer. The iPXE menu will also send specific kernel parameters to tell the FOS Engine (linux) how to react when it boots.

You can take the FOS Engine (bzImage and inits) and just as easily boot directly from a usb flash if you use grub as your boot loader. The FOS Engine will boot from the USB stick without requiring the FOG server to be online. The FOS Engine won’t do much without the proper kernel parameters being passed from the FOG server. But in the end FOS is a specialized, high performance, standalone linux OS.

Now for specifics, I don’t have the details from inside FOS, but I suspect there is something in /etc/init.d that calls the main fog script called /bin/fog that script. The fog master script reads in the passed kernel parameters and then selects the proper task to execute.

Preface

The bits I’m going to cover here are the general outline of what needs to be done to create and deploy a hardware independent image across your fleet of computers. In this tutorial I’m going to discuss how to do this with Dell computers. I know this process works with Lenovo, Intel NUC, and a few others with some caveats. I’m going to touch on some steps that you need to do in MDT to build your universal reference image, but I’m not going to discuss how to setup MDT to create your reference images. There are plenty of examples on the internet on how to do this.

This process makes use of a custom script that gets executed post image deployment but prior to the reboot of the FOS client. This step is vial since we need to make some tweaks to the windows environment pre first windows boot. This is the key. I can’t/won’t share that script I created because of my contract with my employer, because it is derived work because of my employment. So that script is intellectual property of my company. I’ve held the job title of unemployed, its not a great title. The pay stinks, the stress level is high, but the hours are great. I don’t plan on going there any time soon, so no script for you. BUT, sitting here on my zorin (ubuntu) dell laptop I should be able to reverse engineer the important parts to give the crafty scripters here the tools they need to create their own post install script.

Our master image is created following the standard Microsoft SOE guidelines, meaning MDT to build the reference image, sysprep to reseal the image, use a custom unattend.xml file (required to make this process work for Win10) and some disk imaging tool to capture and deploy the image to the target hardware. In this process sysprep is mandatory since we want to create a single image that can be deployed to any hardware. The generalize process of sysprep removes all hardware references (for the reference image) so that when windows first boots it goes through the hardware discovery process. Without sysprepping the image the process I’m going to discuss will not work. So use sysprep.

When I started out creating this process for FOG, I began with the process we created for deploying Windows XP from a usb stick using Ghost. In that process we would automate the image deployment with ghost to lay a hardware independent image onto the target hardware and then detect the current hardware using a DOS program that would query smbios to get the target hardware. Then once the target hardware was known we would move the correct driver pack into a location where windows would find it on the first boot. This worked extremely well with Windows XP. So I took the knowledge that I had from that process and tried to do something similar with FOG.

I do have to say I did not think up this entire process all by my self. I did start the design base on the information found on this wiki page. https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Auto_driver_Install This page and associated scripts gave me just what I needed to take our xp/ghost process and covert it to windows 7/FOG. So without that wiki page the remainder could not be possible.

NOTE: Changes in FOG's code since this article was written have made it harder to use NAS' as storage node with FOG. If you use a NAS with FOG 1.5.x and beyond the FOG replicator will continue to cycle and recopy files over and over again.

Part 1 NAS Setup

So far I’ve setup what should work from the synology NAS side of the fog storage node. This has NOT been proven to work just yet. So far the synology nas has been configured to what “should work”. On my test NAS I’m using DSM 6.0.

The following is just my short hand notes that will be used to create the actual tutorial. I’m out of time tonight to complete the docs for this.

The first thing we need to do is setup our NAS with the required network shares. To do this you need access to the Synology NAS’s web console. Log into the web console as admin and do the following.

1. Control Panel->Shared Folder
   Create new share
   Name: images
   Location: volume 1
   Checked Hide this shared folder in My Network Places
   Checked Hide sub-folders and files from users without permissions
   Press OK
   NFS Permission (tab)
   Create new Permission
   Hostname or IP: *
   Privilege: Read/Write
   Squash: No mapping
   Security: sys
   Checked Enable asynchronous
   Checked Allow users to access mounted subfolders

2. Control Panel->Shared Folder
   Create new share
   Name: snapins
   Location: volume 1
   Checked Hide this shared folder in My Network Places
   Checked Hide sub-folders and files from users without permissions
   Press OK
   NFS Permision (tab)
   Create new Permission
   Hostname or IP: *
   Privilege: Read/Write
   Squash: No mapping
   Security: sys
   Checked Enable asynchronous

3. Control Panel->Shared Folder
   Create new Share
   Name: tftpboot
   Location: volume 1
   Checked Hide this shared folder in My Network Places
   Checked Hide sub-folders and files from users without permissions
   Press OK
   NFS Permission (tab)
   Create new Permission (we only need this nfs shared for setting up the storage node)
   Hostname or IP: *
   Privilege: Read/Write
   Squash: No mapping
   Security: sys
   Checked Enable asynchronous

4. Control Panel->File Services
   Select Win/Mac/NFS (tab)
   Checked Enable NFS

5. Control Panel->File Services
   Select FTP (tab)
   Checked Enable FTP service (no encryption)
   Checked Use the default port range

6. Control Panel->File Services
   Select TFTP (tab)
   Checked Enable TFTP service
   TFTP root folder: tftpboot (this is the share name we created above)

7. Control Panel->User
   Select User (tab)
   Create user foguser
   Name: foguser
   Description: FOG User
   Password: fogremote1 (pick your own secure password)
   Conform Password: fogremote1
   Checked Disallow the user to change account password
   Press Next
   Join to group: users
   Press Next
   images: RW
   snapins: RW
   tftpboot: RO
   Press Next
   (Assign quota as needed)
   Press Next
   Assign application permissions: None
   Press Next
   Speed limiting: None
   Press Next
   Press Apply

8. Control Panel->User
   Select the Advanced (tab)
   (scroll way at bottom)
   Under User Home
   Checked Enable user home service
   Press Apply

That completes the setup of the Synology NAS.

In the next part we’ll test the network shares we setup above and create the remaining flag files and directory structure needed to transform the Synology NAS into a FOG storage node.

Setting up the foundation for installation

Hopefully this setup will be pretty clean and easy (just hoping…)

In this tutorial, I’ve personally setup each distribution and booted it into a virtual machine. I didn’t run the installer to completion, but I did ensure the installer was running as far as I took the install (unless otherwise noted).

These setups were only tested with a bios (legacy mode) target computer. They WILL NOT work with uefi systems. For uefi based systems they have their own kernel requirements and options. The intent of this tutorial was to show its possible to boot your installation media via pxe booting.

First we need to setup the storage locations for our boot images. The plan is to put the installation media on the /images nfs share and the boot kernel and initfs in the tftp boot directory.

mkdir /images/os
mkdir /tftpboot/os
mkdir /mnt/loop

For the foundation setup that should do it. On to the OS specific configuration…

Link to Windows 7 & Windows 10 BIOS Mode Only
Link WinPE 10 for BIOS and UEFI based systems
Link to Centos 7
Link to Ubuntu 16.04.03
Link to Ubuntu Desktop 19.10
Link to Ubuntu Server 19.10
Link to Ubuntu 17.10 Desktop
Link to Ubuntu 16.04.03
Link to Linux Mint 18.1
Link to Linux Mint 19.1 Cinnamon
Link to Debian 9.2
Link to OpenSuSE Leap 42.3
Link to Fedora Workstation v26
Link to Fedora Workstation v27
Link to Ubuntu Desktop 17.10
Link to installing Samba on your FOG server
Link to Kali Live 2017.3
Link to ESXi v6.5u1
Link to ESXi v6.7u2
Link to SystemRescueCd 5.2.2 x64
Link to GParted 0.33.0 x86
Veeam Agent Rescue DVD
Acronis 2018 (WinPE version)

@julianh A SSD for only the OS will not add much value making FOG go fast. The critical data path is from /images -> nfs -> network -> target computer.

We have seen (sometimes) the FOG Admin will use/change/modify the linux user fogproject's user account properties and password (note: versions prior to 1.5.6 use fog as account name). This is generally a bad idea to use a service account for normal system maintenance. In fog’s case if someone outside of the FOG installer changes this account your fog installation will become broken.

Understand this linux user account fogproject (fog if you run 1.5.5 and earlier versions) is not the same as the default WebGUI administrator of the same name (fog). We are discussing resetting fog’s linux service account fogproject.

You will typically see this error when trying to capture an image to the FOG server. FOG will throw an error like:

Reattempting to update Database.... Failed

or

Message: ftp_login(): Login incorrect., Host: xx.xx.xx.xx, Username: fogproject

The following is the procedure for resyncing the fog service account. This must be done while logged in using a linux user account other than fogproject

1. Review the file /opt/fog/.fogsettings (this is a hidden file)
2. In that file there is a entry called password=
3. Capture that password. You will need it to reset the FOG server.
   Hint: I can tell you its much easier to do these steps by connecting to your fog server using putty from a windows computer. Copy and paste works great using putty (free terminal program).
4. Now reset the linux user fogproject's password with sudo passwd fogproject
5. Now go to the FOG WebGUI and FOG Configuration->FOG Settings->TFTP Server and ensure the password listed in FOG_TFTP_FTP_PASSWORD matches the password you collected in step 2.
6. While still in the FOG WebGUI goto Storage Management->All Storage Nodes select the default or storage node in question.
7. Ensure that Management Password matches the password you collected in step 2.
8. Now finally back in the linux console of the fog server, navigate to where your fog installer files are (typ either /root/fogproject or /opt/fogproject) and rerun the fog installer (./bin/installfog.sh) to realign the remaining bits…

Once these steps have been completed your FOG server should be happy with you again.

@rotoi Are you still running fog 1.3.3? More specifically you updated the kernel to something more modern, but have you touched the init.xz file? FOG 1.3.3 doesn’t (shouldn’t fully) support NVMe drives. The NVMe protocol wasn’t created until much later than FOG 1.3.3. Its akin to trying to install Windows 95 on an 11th gen laptop. It would kind of work, but not really well.

@lcsmd I see it has you have 2 different issues at the moment.

1. The mac address is changing between iPXE and FOS Linux.
2. The image transfer stalling out loading bzImage (FOS Linux kernel).

You are able to get iPXE to boot so your chromebook has an i86 compatible processor in it (in the era of ARM you always have to ask).

Lets tackle the mac address thing first since hopefully that is the easiest. We have seen this in the past where the firmware bios has an option switch for “mac address pass through” This is where the laptop doesn’t have a physical network adapter, but contains a mac address for the physical adapter. The idea is that the built in mac address would overwrite what is in the USB dongle making the device have a unique mac address even if you are using a single dongle for all of your device. This is great and exactly what we would want in an ideal world. FOS Linux’s driver understands this pass through uefi request and honors it.

The problem comes in at the iPXE level, its drivers are not as advanced as linux so it only sees the mac address of the dongle and not the pass through address built into the tablet.

@jonhwood360 said in Feature Request for FOG 1.6.X - Add image integrity verification check:

Exactly, although I’d like to have the option for the algorithm used for the hash be user defined. I know some people may want Sha512, where as for some MD5 is sufficient for this purpose. A default of sha256 probably would be good as its more than the minimum (md5) but not as intense as 512.

I think the cryptographic method is a bit irrelevant in regards to its “bit” complexity. What is important that we can create a hash (fingerprint) of each file as fast as we can to keep up with the imaging process. We are not actually looking to encrypt the image file, but just get a fingerprint of it so we can tell if it has been changed. If we use md5, the linux OS has an external command called md5sum and shasum. These would be preferred instead of the FOG developers having to create their own hashing code. shasum does have a command line switch to set the cryptographic algorithm. So IF sha was selected as the fingerprint protocol then it would be possible to create a FOG setting to pick the algorithm (speaking ignorant of the code required to do such). The linux shasum code supports these methods: 1 (default), 224, 256, 384, 512. The only gotcha I can see is that FOS Linux (the OS used to capture and deploy images) needs to have support for the shasum command. I know it has md5sum, but not sure about shasum.

@tom-elliott There was another request along the same lines where the OP wanted to create a md5 hash of each of the captured image files so he could track if the files were corrupted.

I was able to find the thread here: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/15133/md5-after-image-capture

@b_man There is an option to power off the machine after every execution of FOS Linux (registration, capture, deploy) but its global and not specific to just registration.

But from my standpoint you have your workflow off a bit. If you are making a golden image computer, you should register that computer with FOG BEFORE you build your golden image. That way everything is setup in FOG. Then you sysprep the machine and have sysprep power off the computer. Schedule a capture in fog then pxe boot the target computer and capture the image.

@faboulous said in Preseeded (unattended) netboot UEFI Debian installation:

do machines need a large amount of ram booting this way?

Realize that Rob is addressing the debian installer and not the ubuntu installer. For ubuntu it uses the iso image that gets transferred over to the target computer. Your target computer needs to have enough ram to hold the entire iso image and enough ram for the OS (linux) and virtual drive (initrd.gz). In this setup the iso image is not unpacked but executed as a virtual dvd image in memory.

If you look at the instructions here for the Debian 10.7 installer https://forums.fogproject.org/post/140720 that uses the disk on the FOG server to hold the files from the ISO image. So the only ram requirements is for the linux kernel and the initrd.gz file. In this setup less than 1GB is all that is needed to run the installer.

@cf20corvuss Well lets think about this for a minute.

The screen shot you provided looks like the fog ipxe boot loader. If it is we can then make a few assumptions. My hesitation ATM is that some hypervisor’s use iPXE as their pxe boot rom (Virtual box being one). If we work under the assumption that the screen shot shows the FOG iPXE boot loader we know this.

1. The target computer can speak to the FOG server. We know then because the iPXE boot loader was sent by the FOG server and received by the PXE booting computer.
2. The target computer is getting a dhcp address from some place AND that dhcp information told the client where to get the iPXE boot loader from. So we know that dhcp is working.
3. We know that iPXE has the proper driver for the network card in the pxe booting computer because iPXE sees the mac address of the network adapter.

Where we typically see this is with the network configuration where Spanning Tree is enabled but one of the fast spanning tree protocols are not used. Standard spanning tree will listen for a loop back interface for the first 27 seconds a link is active then start forwarding data. With imaging when the PXE ROM hands off control to iPXE, iPXE will reset the network interface causing the link to drop briefly as iPXE boots. Well this link briefly dropping causes the spanning tree counter to reset. So when the target computer is trying to get an IP address again, spanning tree is still listening for a loop back. By the time standard spanning tree starts forwarding data again, iPXE and FOG have already given up.

You can test this in a physical world by putting a dumb unmanaged switch between the building network and the pxe booting computer. This unmanaged switch will keep the building switch from seeing the brief link drop. Most cheap switches do not support spanning tree. So its all good there.

Now NAT and imaging do not go together with FOG. Everything needs to be bridged with real addresses for FOG imaging to work.

@jonhwood360 said in Issue with EFI through PFSense Firewall:

so one thing I keep seeing in the packet capture which is weird, is that the router option (3) is set to 10.255.252.1 which is the gateway that the fog server uses, but is not the gateway for the external network. .

Well lets think about this for a minute. When I looked at the packet capture I did notice the lease times were different too.

Looking at the config file you provided both the lease times and route address are set correctly. Why are we seeing a difference in the packet captures from the configuration. Its almost like we have a different dhcp server for bios than uefi. Or two instances running with different config files on the FOG server.

@jonhwood360 Do you have the option to use a mirrored network port on the external network? This would give us the best fidelity to the network exchange. On a witness port we can only see the broadcast (dhcp) side of the conversation. We miss all of the unicast traffic. There has to be something different in the exchange between a bios and uefi modes on the same computer. The same exact protocols are used so the firewall shouldn’t be blocking. While this mostlikely is not the case here, we have seen a smaller MTU than 1468 cause tftp issues. Smaller MTUs than 1468 cause the tftp packet to fragment and the receiving computer will reject the file transfer. But one would think if that was the case bios and uefi would be the same.

@jonhwood360 But I assume it still doesn’t boot.

So without the config file alterations you don’t get the screen about filesize 0 bytes, but with the alterations you get that error. Just thinking about it a bit more I think we are on the right direction, maybe just not the right path.

Did you get a workstation pcap of the process where you received the 0 bytes filesize? I’m interested to know if dhcp options 66 and 67 were being set, where it was actually kind of working. If they were there with those settings and the settings were the key for uefi dhcp booting then we just need to work on why the settings were wrong. I didn’t get a chance last night to test this in my home lab where I have a ubuntu server to understand why the settings stopped isc-dhcp from booting. But I’ll look at it tonight if we can’t get it sorted out. The commands I gave you were from the isc-dhcp config file.