@smoblikat You are the first I hear of to get the macbooks to pxe boot. Normally we have people use a USB boot stick On that USB stick we boot right into FOS linux via a grub boot loader. The issue we see on newer macs is that apple has put that T2 (encryption) chip in the middle of everything. So to image the newer apples you need a special FOS linux kernel that has the T2 patch (hack) installed. I have that one-off kernel if you need it.

@baessens 4GB is really small for a linux root partition. I an surprised your server runs.

I have a solution for what you want, but it might not sound easy to you.

1. Create a new virtual disk and connect it to your FOG server. This will be your FOG Images disk. Make it what ever size you need.
2. Partition it using a standard partition format (no lvm).
3. Format the disk with xfs or ext4 format.

This above configuration will allow you to easily grow the disk when/if you need more space. LVM adds in a layer of complexity to expand your disk.

Now what you will do is temporarily mount this new disk, like to /mnt/images then migrate everything in /images to /mnt/images making /images empty.

Then unmount /mnt/images

Lastly mount the new disk to the /images directory and update fstab to mount that disk on every reboot.

@shyvvana You can not do this with FOG. The fog server can only have one imaging interface (network). The FOG programming code has static text entries in its configuration to point to its imaging network adapter.

You can technically add more network interfaces to the FOG server, but it will ALWAYS respond with the IP address of the defined imaging interface.

The only way a single fog server can service/image two subnets is to make the subnets fully routable by using a router between the 10.0.0.0 and 10.0.1.0 networks. If you have a router between these subnets then you can use FOG to image computers on either subnet.

@will I agree please create your own post. There are several things you can do pretty easily, its just not proper to confuse this thread.

@bmick10 said in Deleting Hosts:

If I delete a device that is still in production on the network. It will not remove from domain or lose connection?

Correct. The only impact to the target computer is that if the fog client is installed on the target computer it will no longer get instructions from the FOG server. The FOG Client will be abandoned with no instructions.

If I have a machine named ittech20 and remove that from database when I restart in pxe will the computer still be named ittech20.

Yes the computer will remain untouched. The only thing you will notice is that in the fog iPXE menu the computer will appear as unregistered.

So if I delete all of them since the machine still has service running on will it talk back to server and sync to database?

If the FOG Client is installed on the machine but they are no longer in the database the FOG Client should reregister the computer. Now that I think about it. BUT they will be registered in a pending state and must be approved before you can work with them in the FOG Gui. Its been a while since I did this part so its not as clear in my mind. But they should go into the database again in a pending state.

There is no negative impact of deleting a host. The only thing that is removed is the metadata saved in the database. It will not remove any images or such. All history and inventory items associated with that host will also be deleted.

If you have a specific concern please ask.

@astrugatch I can surely see the merits of this, but I think then you push the issue onto… OK which hypervisors do you support? Some have direct import paths and other do not. I’m not saying your idea is bad in any way it just pushes the problem down to another choke point. Ideally this is where docker would come into play.

One of the other mods have built a demographics tool to monitor what OS FOG is being installed on so the developers have a focus for development and support. The top 3 linux distros are still the top 3 when it comes to installing fog Ubuntu, Centos, Debian (in that order for FOG installs).

@seppim Ok from your testing with 1GB of ram any compression over 19 with a 30GB (data) capture size it fails.

The issue with zstd compression (not an issue but a fact) is that zstd is a very good data compressor but it takes more RAM with the higher compression values. This is because it needs to buffer more of the image into memory to be able to sample more data to squeeze it down. My bet is if your pxe booting system would have 4GB of ram this issue would not appear at the compression of 21.

We are all learning here too, that is why its important to have people like you willing to help find the problem for the next guy.

XenServer 8.2 Installer

1. Create the target directory on the FOG server

mkdir -p /tftpboot/EFI/xenserver

2. From the XenServer installer iso the following files and place them in the /tftpboot/EFI/xenserver directory
   grubx64.efi install.img vmlinuz xen.gz
3. Create the grub.cfg configuration file in the /tftpboot/EFI/xenserver and insert this text into the grub.cfg file.

menuentry "XenServer Install (serial)" {
 multiboot2 /EFI/xenserver/xen.gz dom0_mem=1024M,max:1024M watchdog dom0_max_vcpus=4 com1=115200,8n1 console=com1,vga
 module2 /EFI/xenserver/vmlinuz console=hvc0
 module2 /EFI/xenserver/install.img
} 

4. Create a new FOG iPXE menu entry using the FOG Web ui FOG Configuration -> New iPXE Menu. Fill out the form using this data
   Menu Item: os.xen.install
   Description: XEN 8.2 Installer
   Parameters:
   chain tftp://${fog-ip}/EFI/xenserver/grubx64.efi || goto MENU
   Menu Show with: All Hosts
5. That’s it, just pxe boot your target system and pick XEN 8.2 Installer from the FOG iPXE boot menu.

ref: https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX217680
ref: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/14970/uefi-boot-install-of-xenserver-close-but-no-cigar

@seppim Unfortunately you changed 2 things at the same time so its unclear what fixed the partclone.imager problem. The kernel updates should have only have addressed new hardware.

Would you mind making a second test capture (to a new image definition) with the compression set back to 21 with the 5.x kernel installed. This is a unique error and we need to find what really fixed the problem. As you follow Sebastian’s debug test. You are not the first person to hit upon this issue.

Also how much ram is installed in this computer? 4GB?

@sebastian-roth Does it still support containers, yes. I have not used them. I’ve used the traditional VM approach (what I’m most familiar with coming from the vSphere world). The modern proxmox is very robust. I haven’t needed to go “under the hood” at all to make things work. It works right out of the box.

@bristow-0 I can say I have several instances of FOG running on my home virtual lab that is based on proxmox. I don’t recall needing to do anything special when I setup the proxmox server to support FOG other than making sure the network adapter was bridged so NAT wasn’t used.

@seppim This is just an idea, in the image definition UbuntuServer20_1 lower your image compression to 11 and see if you can upload then. If you are using zstd with a compression of 21 that will take a lot of RAM on the target computer.

Just out of curiosity how much RAM does this capture computer have?

Also looking at this I’m not sure why pigz_comp == -21 that just seems wrong. One might think that should be a positive integer value.

@racera4 said in Upgrade 1.5.7 to 1.5.9:

Do I just download the 1.5.9 version of FOG and run the install script again?

If you want to use the tarball method yes. Your fog server will need internet access when the script is rerun just to ensure all of the required modules are installed. Once the script is done if necessary you can remove internet access.

When you rerun the installer a second time, I will use all of the settings selected when fog was just installed so the upgrade is pretty simple. Just remember there are two steps to installing. The console installer will stop half way through and ask you to load a web page to update the database. Once that is done go back to the console and press enter to complete the setup. You can rerun the installer 1 or 100 times it will not break the running system. Sometime if the FOG admin gets settings out of alignment we will ask them to rerun the installer to fix the alignment issue.

I do recommend the git method for the simple fact as you can switch the installer to the dev branch to get fixes from the whole number releases. Meaning the tarball will bet a 1.5.9, but the git dev branch is at 1.5.9.<something> that includes fixes from 1.5.9. If you used the git method updating the installer package would be as simple as changing to the installer folder directory and issue a git pull the install files would be upgraded to 1.5.9 then you would just rerun the installer. I prefer the git method myself, but the tarball works just as well.

Of course with any upgrade make sure you have adequate backups of your FOG server just in case…

@epsilon52 WHAT DO YOU MEAN ITS FOG’s FAULT?

If you are still unbroken lets continue.

So let me ask you. Are the target computers on the same subnet as the FOG server or are they separated from the fog server by a WAN/VPN link?

If the fog server and target computers are on the same subnet and you are still having issues please follow these instructions. https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/9673/when-dhcp-pxe-booting-process-goes-bad-and-you-have-no-clue

Upload the pcap to a file share site and either post the link here or PM me the link and I’ll take a look at it.

@george1421 If I guessed right lets see what this does. You will need to go into FOG Configuration -> New iPXE Menu and fill it out like this

Menu Item: fog.custom.inventory
Description: Custom Quick Inventory
Parameters:
kernel bzImage loglevel=4 initrd=init.xz root=/dev/ram0 rw ramdisk_size=275000 web=${boot-url}/ consoleblank=0 rootfstype=ext4 storage=${fog-ip}:/images/ storageip=${fog-ip} loglevel=4 mode=inventory deployed=1
imgfetch init.xz || goto MENU
Menu Show with: All Hosts

@flareimp Can you explain this a bit more? What are you doing in the web gui in regards? Are you doing this via the advanced tasks in this host configuration?

@will Lets try this kernel.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1blQf70N3um0bXmr1wjzQbQk47TA97gpW/view?usp=sharing

its bzImage593RT2 the only changes is enabling that specific intel network adapter driver.

@wayne-workman Very nicely done!! Its good to see the data flowing in now. It should give the developers an idea where to focus development and what’s really important.

@zc0rp said in HDClone as bootable iso:

Yes i can run the exe because it is an portable edition

Great this then gives us a path or at least an idea. In this post https://forums.fogproject.org/post/103323 it talks about building a winpe image that we can use to boot an OS. (sidebar: I’ve done this for a ghost imager). Starting at step 3 it shows how to build a winpe boot environment. You will place the files into the image path before the image is resealed back into the wim. This will place the files you need in the wim file that will get deployed. Once we get to the boot.wim we are done with this tutorial. There is no need to make the iso because that is only for bios mode.

Once we have the boot.wim file then we can follow this tutorial. https://forums.fogproject.org/post/103331 to setup a winpe boot environment for both bios and uefi using wimboot.