I guess I’m going to have to defer to one of the developers on this one. It almost sounds like there is a bad setting in the .fogsettings file because its trying to use a resource that it doesn’t have access to.
Was this a fully functional FOG server at any time?
Interesting, (just questioning). You say you have direct internet access yet svn did not work?
SVN should work right out of the box without any changes, if you had a proxy server between your FOG server and the internet then you need to make a few adjustments. Something is up here. The first thing that the update does is tries (at this point) is to talk to your distribution repository server(s).
Sorry for the 20 questions,
What OS and version is this on?
Can you try to use subversion to checkout the current trunk?
It sounds like the installer script can’t reach the correct repositories. Have you don’t a OS update apt-get/yum ??
Just for clarity how do you have internet access on this box? Does it have direct internet access or is this box sitting behind a proxy server of some sort?
If I understand what you are saying then, in the fog settings I would set the OU to your computer’s OU, then when you setup the host change it to the proper location for that host. You can do it one by one in each host’s active directory settings, or via applying the setting to a group of computers all at once. (as you noted the group does not retain the new setting but all hosts that are members of that group have the new setting applied)
I guess I’ll have to defer to the developers on this one, sorry. This is a bit beyond what I know.
I would suggest that you get one working. Once you have one working then you can use the update group function to change all the rest to the correct OU, and finally update the defaults in the fog settings so any new systems will have the right settings.
Ok so they are not installed in the path I posted? You can pick them up from the sourceforge site or just rerun the installer again.
I have two questions for you:
The reason why I ask, I had an issue where the fog server was behind a proxy server and I applied the svn trunk update almost everything installed fine except the new fog client wouldn’t download and I couldn’t pxe boot because the boot images were missing. I found the issue that the svn installer uses curl to get the fog client and boot image files but since curl didn’t know about the proxy server settings it would just fail to get them. I had to set the environment variables to point to the proxy server then everything worked OK.
(edit) The boot files need to be in this path: /var/www/html/fog/service/ipxe and the file names are bzImage and init.xz. If they are missing FOG will display the boot menu but if you select anything the target computer will just restart (/edit)
I can tell you yes, the format needs to be in ldap format and it appears you have the right format as long as the maintenance OU exists under your main OU (like Computers do) then it should place it in the right spot. I can say from one of my installs I have (ou=Desktops,ou=Computers,ou=NYC,ou=US,dc=domain,dc=local)
Since your target computer is ending up in the Computers OU you must have the right information to join the computer to the domain so the FogCrypt part is right too.
When you make a change to the group… everything disappears. That one got me too. FOG applies the information to the host based on the group but the group doesn’t keep the settings. It would be logical for the group to retain this setting but it doesn’t, it is just used to apply the values to the host. I would go into the target host you are interested in and check the AD settings there. Make sure the proper OU settings are there, then redeploy the host again.
I guess I should clarify. We use MDT to create our reference image on a VM with a 40GB disk. During the MDT deploy task we apply all of the windows updates. If we are making a fat image then we install the additional software at that time (using a fat image task sequence in MDT). When we have the image the way we want it, then we sysprep it and capture the image. At this capture point we still only have a 40GB disk. So we deploy that 40GB disk to the target computer and then once on the target computer we extend the disk with diskpart.
We do it this way because we rebuild the golden image each quarter. If you have everything setup to create your reference image automatically, the actual hands on time is very small. What takes the most time from start to finish is windows updates. So far with the WIndows 7 updates it takes overnight to apply them all (~14 hrs).
While I got a bit off point, the key is to deploy a smaller image to your client computers than their smallest disk size then extend their logical disk to the physical size during the cleanup process.
@jquilli1 said:
I was told to use “Multiple Partition Image - Single Disk (Non-resizable)” if I’m capturing an image that’s Windows 7 or above. Have I been mistaken this whole time?
While I quickly scanned this thread, I didn’t see what client OS you are deploying. I can say that we deploy “Multiple Partition Image - Single Disk (Non-resizable)” to all of our Win7 and Win8.x (and soon Win10) systems (MBR only). The one thing that we DO is create our reference image on a VM with a small hard drive (40GB) that way we are sure it will deploy correctly to any hardware we might have in the future. 40GB is sufficient for windows+updates+core applications. When we deploy that 40GB image to a computer with a 128GB (or larger) drive, initially the logical hard drive will be 40GB. In the SetupComplete.cmd file we launch a command script to window’s diskpart.exe utility to extend the logical drive to the size of the physical disk. While we haven’t had to do that with linux there are commands to do that too.
To date we’ve deployed several hundred systems using this method, with FOG and a few other deployment tools.
At the risk of extending this feature request even more…
Please understand I’m not trying to be difficult, I truly want to understand if what I want to do is possible. I think we have a communication misalignment. I’m not doing a very good job explaining the situation because I keep seeing the same results (maybe that is the only answer, I don’t know).
But I’m assuming from your context that in my drawing below there is one full deployment server in that network with the rest storage nodes. Is that a correct assumption?
I understand the function of the location plugin, It allows you to assign storage groups and storage devices to a location and then you link a hosts to a location so it knows where to get and put (if necessary) an image to. I get that. I’ve been using FOG for quite a while.
The issue(s) I’m seeing here are this:
The fog system is very versatile and you guys have put a LOT of effort into it since the 0.3x days. And you should be acknowledged for your efforts. Understand I’m not knocking the system that has been created or your time spent on the project.
I worked through this post, I can see that having a single master node with the rest storage nodes would work if:
@Joseph-Hales said:
If you are not updating images that often it might be more logical to sneaker-net images to the other site we you make changes.
Good point, it just may be easier and quicker to throw the image on a flash drive and overnight it to the other sites if transfer speed is required. But then there is more hands on steps at each site to import the image and create the DB entries.
While its clear that the current FOG trunk can do this, but right now the how is missing from this discussion.
@Wayne-Workman said:
But I wanted to point out that a typical 16GB (compressed size) image, pushing one copy of the image to one other node across a 1.5Mb/s link will take roughly 24 hours, and that’s if you have 100% of the 1.5Mb/s dedicated to the transfer.
Have you thought about this? How big are your images?
I selected a network connection specifically that was artificiality low for the POC. I see network latency being a real issue with a distributed design.
Our thin image (Win7 only+updates) are about 5GB in size and our fat image is over 15GB. At 1.5Mb/s I would suspect that we would have ftp transfer issues with file moves that were taking longer than 24hrs to complete. But that is only a speculation.
Its good to hear that FOG could do this without any changes.
Knowing what you know about the new features built into the SVN trunk, can I do this without any new “stuff” being added to FOG?
@Tom-Elliott said:
@george1421 I’m still confused.
Its highly possible that I’m ignorant to the features you have added to the trunk builds, plus I’m not doing a good job of explaining the current situation were I think FOG is highly capable to accomplish this with a few adjustments. I’ve looked through the wiki to see if there was something similar to what I need to do. The only thing that came close was https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/Managing_FOG#Storage_Management (the second graphic that shows the multiple storage groups). This is the POC concept used to setup my test environment.
I took that previous drawing and build this sample layout.
In this scenario I have these requirements (almost sounds like a school project):
To clarify the above picture:
In the HQ location there is only one deployment server HQMasterNode
The LAMasterNode and ATLMasterNode are connected back to HQ via a MPLS link (right now this is all done in a single virtual environment)
In the LA site there are 3 FOG servers. One FOG deployment server, One FOG storage server and One FOG Storage server with PXE booting enabled (I think that is an option). The LA site also has two VLANs with about 700 nodes distributed across the VLANs. There are two defined locations for the LA site (LA_BLD01 and LA_BLD02)
The ATL site only has one FOG Deployment server and one storage node on a single subnet.
This is how I have the test environment built in my test lab.
As I posted before I seeded the images in the HQMasterNode with images from my production FOG server. No replication happened between the HQMasterNode, LAMasterNode or ATLMasterNode until I created the first image definition on the HQMasterNode. Once that first image definition was created all images that were seeded on the HQMasterNode were replicated to the other two nodes in the HQ Storage Group. This worked great, now all image created on the HQMasterNode were located at the site FOG Deployment servers. The images did not get distributed beyond each sites MasterNode though. On the ATLMasterNode I created a single image definition and then the images were replicated to the ATLSlaveNode01.
The first issue I ran into was even though I created all of the image definitions on the HQMasterNode those definitions were not copied to the LAMasterNode or the ATLMasterNode. Somehow I need to get those definitions (I’ll assume the same for the snapins) from the HQ deployment server to each site’s deployment server. This could be accomplished with a mysqldump of the tables before the replication starts and then picked up at the remote end and an mysqlimport run. Or by making url calls to each of the sites deployment servers to update their database with the image information.
@Wayne-Workman point well taken.
I’m not really interested in creating a mishmash of scripts to do crazy things. I can see what needs to be done to make this work as FOG is currently designed.
I’ve spent some time recreating my POC environment and have a mostly workable system using the current SVN. Based on the results of my testing I changed the a word in the title of this feature request to foreign master storage node from slave, because it sounds much cooler and is a bit more accurate.
All joking aside. I found if I create 3 storage groups which represent 3 different sites each with their own master storage node and then in the center storage group make the master storage node from the left and right storage groups a “storage node” or to use my made up name “Foreign Master Storage node” in the center storage group I can send the images from a central master storage node to all other storage nodes in the other storage groups. (its a bit hard to explain with just words, but it does work). Eventually each storage group will be located at a different site, so I need a fully functional master node in each storage group.
I did find an interesting fact, I seeded the center master storage node with images from my production server, but the replication did not start until I created the first image entry in the database. Then the files were replicated from the center Master Storage node to the other Foreign Master Storage nodes. The issue I’m at right now is that I need to get the content from the images and snapins table to both the left and right Foreign Master Storage nodes or they won’t start replicating to their storage nodes.
While Tom may have to confirm, as far as I know you don’t log into a storage only. Only the main node has the ability to login. I think the last time I tried I to connect to a storage node /fog folder there was a basic message saying you can’t login here.