Posts made by Jaymes Driver

The hardrives that are currently being produced are of a “new format”. It uses a new method of storing sectors for use with partitions on magnetic disks in hard disk drives that exceeds 512 to 520 bytes per sector.

The new format is for 4 KB native mode, there is no emulation layer; disk media directly exposes its 4 KB physical sector size to the OS.
As you can see this is a new technology so until we completely understand it and it’s capabilities, and right now it doesn’t exactly work with FOG.

I never thought about this, but what kind of a network environment do you have?

We operate on a Novell NDS environment we are on NetWare version 6.5

HECC (Hoosier Educational Computer Coordinators) Conference is coming up in November. Anyone from the Indiana area planning on attending?

My corporation will be sending 6 of us to be taking classes and gathering as much information as we can. I was wondering who all is going and what areas of interest are you pursuing?

Is anyone interested in meeting up to talk FOG? Perhaps next year we can setup a booth and teach the others a few things! Currently I have set up and deployed three FOG servers in our Network, but soon we will be migrating from a Novell environment to an Active Directory environment. I’d be interested in picking some brains as well as gathering some resources for questions and problems we may come across.

This is all of course just speculation! Questions, comments, concerns all welcome! I look forward to seeing you there!

Not to stray to far from topic, what is the option your are using to select the partition type? I normally use Multi Partition - All Disks.

See if uploading the image this way has any affect on the outcome.

Awesome, I got a form of it working. However if I don’t have the Novell client installed on the computer, it will not map the drive. It tries, it just never succeeds. This should more than work for my student and staff images. Thanks a bunch!

I would just like to figure out how to map the drive without installing the Novell client, but that isn’t your problem

I’ll give it a shot! I normally use a virutal image and install the novell client before I push the image, there is just one specific model that has a hiccup with the NIC drivers. I’ll let you know what I figure out with the scripts.

Not trying to be lazy, I know that Novell and AD are both LDAP network I just didn’t know if the commands transposed

Ahh yes, another Active Directory environment.

I’ve been talking with our technology director, and I have him almost convinced that an Active Directory environment would be good for us.

Any experience with a Novell Network? I haven’t been able to get anything to path on my Novell network without first logging on, and if there are no NIC drivers, there is no log on. If there is no log on, there is no access. Are there similar ways to connect to content via the command line? Ideas?

No rush, my teachers are busy teaching again so I can go back to playing and learning. Windows 7 got thrown on me last minute last year, so this year I want to take some time to prepare and work the bugs out; I learned to sysprep and all that jazz, now I need to streamline and fix some hiccups.

I agree Tom, I use a similar method as what you have described. But I as well work in a school corporation and we only keep about 5 - 6 models on hand, and normally share drivers. Since we use the same company, it normally just involves dropping in the new driver, sysprepping and pushing out the new image.

I would be interested in looking at your scripts and information to see how I can streamline my processes a little better.

But on the same note, a colleague of mine uses the same process as Lee has described,

[quote]Personally I am running fog in ESX 5.1 on a gig nic and on a dedicated vswtich on a private deployment vlan and i don’t have any issues[/quote]

I want to quote you on this.

ESXi 5.1 server with a 1 gig card.
Dedicated vSwitch and a Private vLAN

I have not tested all environments, but I can tell you that there is a difference in the hardware you use to build a server. Our antiquated technology I was using as a “server” was a poor excuse for a server. I’m not pointing the entire blame at the hardware, but I can see where it could be the issue. However, installing a valid OS and a Virtual Box Image resulted in MUCH faster upload speeds ON THE SAME MACHINE! I can’t explain why.

We do not have a dedicated switch that FOG is running on, nor was I using a dedicated switch for the ESXi server.

Perhaps there needs to be a “minimum requirements” thread on the successful set ups with VMWare.

I’m glad ESXi works in your environment, but without cash to throw at a server for the only specifics of creating a virtual image, I would say ESXi is an extremely poor choice. If you have other uses for ESXi then using it as an imaging solution could work.

I’m not here to bat for either company, but Virtual Box is far easier to set up an manage, and I hardly notice a difference with the Virtual Machine running. I can’t say the same for VMWare, the only time I got good speeds was when I remote desktop to the machine and leave out the VMWare Fusion connection program.

Virtual Box is FREE, 100%, and you can run it on practically any hardware as long as an OS can live on it. This is a much better solution if virtual imaging is the only purpose for it.

We do have ESXi servers, they run some of our datasync, our mailbox programs, and a few others. But these machines are built to be servers and handle the load that they are given. I need to check to see if I can upload an image from those servers with any better speeds. However, I am not really that interested in troubleshooting the issue unless someone has a direction to send me down, because I am really happy with Virtual Box.

To be more specific, the EXACT same machine I use as a FOG server, I was using as a ESXi server. We have left over tower units of the same model and they include 8gb ram, 500 gb hdd, intel core 2 duo processor at 2.86 ghz, NX8800GT Video card. My FOG sever hits speeds of 6 gigs and I normally see it float around 4.25 gigs, I’m sorry but that hardware should be more than suffice for a server housing virtual Operating systems for imaging with only 2gb ram per machine, only one virtual machine running at a time.

Would you mind leaving your information on what it is you did to solve your issue so that others in your shoes will be able to use this thread as a reference?

Awesome, glad you got it working!

I’ve never personally had any luck using the NTFS Resizable with my image but I’m glad it worked for you!

Yes it’s windows 7 SP1, Windows 32 bit.

I appreciate your feedback.

I have multiple computers all the same model, only this particular unit is giving me fits. I believe it is actually a failing controller.

Just to keep everyone posted, I have created a ticket with the company and it has been escalated within and I am awaiting further instructions, I hope they help me to find this issue so I can help to find a resolve for it in the future.

I normally put a small version of linux on the drive to make sure the drive works and it’s not a partition issue. I download something lie pfsense that takes less than 5 minutes to install, then I run it with fog.

This isn’t the PROPER way or the ONLY way, I just know it works with my hardware.

To answer your second question, if you are installing windows and allowing it to create the 100mb partition, any of the two options above will work. I normally choose the Multi Partition - All Disk option though.

Welcome to FOG. We hope you enjoy your stay.

Are you a previous FOG user? Are you new to FOG? What are your plans for using FOG?

There’s currently a work in progress which is a heavy re-write for the FOG code and hopefully it will bring some new integration for the UEFI Support and a few others!

This forum is a great resource and everyone is pretty nice here, just remember to search!!!

once again, Welcome!

UEFI isn’t exactly supported yet, we have talked about the addition in 0.33 but currently it is unavailable in 0.32, I would recommend adjusting your BIOS settings to something legacy.

If adjusting the settings in the BIOS doesn’t work, you may have to build a custom kernel or use the kitchen sink. BUT Atheros cards normally function well with linux, I would first try adjusting your BIOS Settings.

A. Set up your BIOS to boot from the network card as the first device OR if you have the option to choose the boot device do so and choose your network adapter.
B. Your computer will look for a tftp server and download a file
C. Your computer will display this file as the Pxe Boot Menu
D. From the fog PXE boot menu, you will see:

Boot from hard disk
Run memtest86
Quick host registration and Inventroy
Perform full host registration and Inventory
Quick Image
Client system information
Debug Mode

E. Choose Client System Information

F. Your computer will load another menu and it will look like this:

1.) Reboot
2.) IP Information
3.) Partition Information
4.) Check FOG compatability
5.) Ping a Host
6.) Display MAC Address
7.) Show DMI Information

G. Type 4 and press Enter

I’m going to shamelessly bump this thread.

What I have done: I created a new base image and adjusted my sysprep process for these particular units. These units are my nComputing units.
Anyone unfamiliar with nComputing - I have a hardware card that outputs to NIC cards, these NIC cards are plugged into a physical box. We strap them on each monitor and this controls the mouse, keyboard, video, and sound while using different users in the Windows environment and creating “sessions” which are more or less virtual environments.

I believe the problem is not with the nComputing hardware, but rather the computer hardware. I have tried to image the machine in question with and without the hardware installed, I receive the same error.

I’ve managed to create a working image, and I had to do a completely different sysprep and unattend process than I was previously able to work with. I have all my computers of this particular model working except for one. I can’t for the life of me figure what is different with this hardware. I’m going to look into the partitions on the drive and see if that will help me to understand this issue, but I need other ideas and places to look. The busy time has died down and I have all my teachers “subdued” at the moment and I need to get their student stations working.

But please, has someone else encountered something similar? What can I do to curb this error? My next step is to set up the image on this unit individually, and I don’t want to do that. I have an image it just refuses to configure on my hardware.

That’s insane!!! Well I’m glad you found it. We are still running office 2007, and I am pretty sure the SMART boards we use are the 400 model, but don’t quote me on that