@jaumeramos Does the system account have access to that share?
The best way to test would be to use a tool like psexec (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/psexec)
to open a command prompt as the system account psexec -s -i cmd.exe
And then you can see if that’s the issue. If it is I think the share needs to have permissions of the domain computer accounts or network system or something like that. If that’s not this issue, then I’ll do some more testing and update the docs accordingly.

MODs note: Moved from https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/14752/fog-1-5-4-8-printer-management-config-file-field-missing

@Huecuva Well poo

I think a solution exists we just gotta find it.

So just want to do a quick review of where we’re at.

The problem is that after imaging it does boot into windows from the fog pxe menu and then it never works again?
Or is the problem that you image and then it doesn’t boot to windows at all? Sounds like you said it seems to work once, then the windows setup changes the boot order (which is something it does with bcdedit and you can actually do this manually as well (try bcdedit /enum all to see all the boot options windows can set from command line. You can make it put the network boot first, it’s just a bit of a complicated task)

Anyway, since refind did work from usb that means it should work. I have seen it not work from pxe when it didn’t work from usb.

Some things worth trying are as @george1421 mentioned different ipxe.efi files. If the one that is working at the other site didn’t do the trick one of the other included ones (realtek.efi, intel.efi, etc) might make a difference.

Another thing would be to take the refind.conf from the working usb and put that on the fog server. I’d adjust it to not use the gui (can’t remember the exact setting in the file, but I remember it being pretty clear) and see if it works via pxe.

You could also consider using a bootloader such as grub2win and putting a local copy of the ipxe.efi file on each computer’s efi partition. Then when you need it to boot to fog you have a script that changes the grub.conf boot order. But that’s a super complicated approach. I actually do this because I used to have random issues with the windows bootloader and I also like having the menu at each startup to go to fog, uefi firmware settings, or windows. I can walk you through this but I make it part of my image, so you have to get it to boot to network pxe at least once.

@Huecuva On HP computers I believe it’s called Wake Up Boot Source or at least it was once. I’m not next to one I can test at the moment. It might not exist on all boards. I’ve seen it on most business oriented machines

The theme has been reverted for now. I have made a top level tree and structured things per the sphinx and rtd recommendations.
Since it’s now following the structure it’s designed to use, switching themes down the road should be easy breezy.

So I don’t have any of this exact model but we do have a couple lenovo’s that don’t come with ethernet ports.

We didn’t get that same adapter, we got the usb-c ethernet adapter and the special proprietary lenovo ones for the x390 and l390. But that usb adapter does say it supports pxe boot, so it should be fine.

One thing I had to do to get things working was adjust a setting in the bios called Mac Address Pass Through. There may be an option to select from internal or second Mac Address. Try them both and see if it makes any difference.

I would also second the recommendation from @george1421 to update to 5.6.18

@Huecuva
Yes, /var/www/fog is a symlink to /var/www/html/fog.

This is created by the fog installer for backwards compatibility. The default path for httpd/apache sites in all linux distros used to be /var/www but it changed to /var/www/html a few years ago.

The symlink is maintained in case of any code (internal for fog or customized by users) doesn’t get broken if it’s still pointing to a path that starts with /var/www/fog

@Sebastian-Roth @Jurgen-Goedbloed I have got the new theme working with scrolling toc and all. I think the top menu needs a little tlc https://fogproject.readthedocs.io

Do we want to stick with this theme or revert back to the default theme, I know @Jurgen-Goedbloed mentioned he didn’t like it as much. I don’t want to go changing the readme with the structural changes if we’re not gonna stick with this theme. Personally I didn’t like it at first but it’s grown on me and it’s pretty easy to navigate.

@wmw509 Disabling CSM makes sense. I’ve seen a lot of bioses that if CSM is enabled it only lets you use the legacy/bios pxe boot. I’ve had that disabled on all my hardware for so long I forgot it was a thing.

@Sebastian-Roth Oh My goodness, how embarrassing. Yes it should have been /var/www/html/fog/service/ipxe

@Huecuva The show platform thing should give you a better idea for sure on what the problem is.
And we do still want to know what the dhcp options are set to. That tells us how you’re getting your computers to boot to the fog server. One is pointing it to your fog server as a tftp server and the other tells us which pxe bootfile you are using. Sometimes a different pxe bootfile can make a difference in the boot behavior which is why a few options are provided. Most of the time the default ipxe.efi option does the trick for uefi options.

Another thing you could try is create a bootable usb with refind. I suggest using rufus (https://rufus.ie/) to get the file on the usb but there are many ways. Here’s a link to how to get the different refind versions http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/getting.html. I would go ahead and try the newest version. Usually if you can boot to a version of refind from usb, then it will work the same when booting from the network. I say usually as I have seen it work on a usb boot and then not via network, but if that happens it still helps to narrow down where the problem is. I would suggest trying the latest version (which I assume is what is included with fog 1.5.9) and see if it boots. If it doesn’t then go back to 0.11.0 and see if that helps. If none of them work, then perhaps contacting the refind developer with your hardware info would be wise to let him know it’s not working.

As another workaround option (hopefully we find a full solution though) you could see if your uefi firmwares support a wake on lan boot option. i.e. you set them to boot to network if they get a wake on lan packet, but the boot order for normal startups stays as the hard drive. Then when you image a computer you shut it down, set the wake on lan checkbox when deploying the image from fog, and let the wake on lan do the trick. Some computers this works and some give you a popup asking if you want ipv4 or ipv6 pxe, if you get that pop up then you’d need it to have an option to disable the ipv6 option so it just goes from WOL to ipv4 pxe boot. It’s for sure easier to just have network boot as the first option, but this is a workaround I employed before finding my refind solution.

@Sebastian-Roth I did not know that refind.efi was an older version and refind_x64.efi was a newer one. That’s a nice touch if it’s still true.
Also @wmw509 sorry for not double checking my guide, I forgot that you had to rename the files after extracting, I have a script that manages restoring my refind binary and config on every update so I haven’t had to extract and look at the file names in quite some time.

@Huecuva that is a good question I don’t think I have a great answer too sadly. There’s probably a way but I haven’t actually found one other than comparing file sizes of the binary. There’s probably metadata in the file somewhere to access the version.

I would try switching the refind binary to version 0.11.0.

I just posted how to do this in this forum post https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/14850/refind-not-working-properly

I would then use the default efi REFIND_EFI exit type and it will likely do the trick.

Hope that helps.

We have a subreddit!?

But anyway, assuming you have all uefi images and machines and no custom exit types on the hosts, there are some known problems with newer versions of rEFInd that affect select hardware. Version 0.11.0
You can find that version here https://sourceforge.net/projects/refind/files/0.11.0/

There are various hp computers that have issues with versions after 0.11.0, and reports of various other machines in the forums. I contacted the refind developer about this back in like 2017 or 2018 when the problem first started, but his response ultimately ended up being that he didn’t think it was a widespread enough issue to isolate and fix. In his defense he’s the only dev on the project as far as I know. But since then I just revert to 0.11.0 since it does the job.

I usually download the flashdrive one and extract it with 7zip (the zip and then the file extracted from the zip). Then you can use your favorite ftp/scp client such as winscp to copy the refind binary to /var/www/fog/html/service/ipxe/refind.efi you may also need to copy over refind_x64.efi
I would suggest making .old versions of the existing binaries.
You can also mess with the refind.conf file in that same folder.
Note that these binaries and that conf file will be overwritten with every update of the fog server.

Hope that helps.

@Sebastian-Roth I’ve almost got a decent prototype of our docs with that theme live. There are some things that aren’t working and I haven’t sorted out why yet. Mainly the floating ‘what’s on this page’ on the right doesn’t seem to float when you scroll on our site. Trying to find the css or js that is missing. But other than that I like this theme. It changes our structuring a bit but makes it more flexible.

@Sebastian-Roth I tried to install that theme per the instructions in their git to no avail. I tried following some of the example site’s configs too and haven’t got it to work yet. I think it’s worth getting, just keeping you updated.

Edit

It wasn’t working because I had a dyslexic moment and because they were missing steps in their instructions

installs with pydata-sphinx-theme but then you define it as your theme with pydata_sphinx_theme those silly underscores and dashes.
I also had to add a html_context section and a html_theme_options sections in the conf.py. And I had to manually copy over the _templates files from the theme’s repo into our project. But I got it working. It changes things up a little bit but it’s fixable, it’s just a question of what makes the most sense.

There are still some kinks to work out but I think I like it.

It ends up looking like this

The front page is still very much a rough draft. But we could have something like this as exists in many other pages using this theme. Note the little panels. I figure we could have links to each top level section with a brief summary of what information is in each section.

This also changes it from combining pages into one index to more individual pages. It can be a bit easier to navigate this way and you still keep that information grouped together nicely in this theme. This is a nice find @Sebastian-Roth. All the themes I played with outside the default removed the read-the-docs version modal. This one is pretty great

@Sebastian-Roth I kind of like it, it doesn’t appear to have to think I like about the default read-the-docs theme with the expanding sidebar

But that example also doesn’t have a ton of section levels, so I’ll give adding it a go and see what it looks like for us. The Jupyter page seemed to be loading a bit slower than other ones, but that is probably unrelated to the theme. I mean we could also customize our own theme and make it look like for 1.6’s gui. But that could be a separate project.

@Wayne-Workman
For at least the .fogsettings page, we’ve already go that in the reference section I believe https://fogproject.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/index.html#the-fogsettings-file

I like the FSCrawler, and ansible, and readthedocs documentation tree structure layouts the best myself. Having a few very top level things to break up and organize the rest. Then it expands on down.

I think as long as we get the general structure agreed upon, changing up the order of things or adding new sections will be simple.

I made a draft of a top level tree

I think we may need subfolders beyond this rather than including everything in one sectioned out page like we’re doing for the installation and management sections.

I’d appreciate some feedback. I was thinking 10 top level categories is a good limit, but will everything fit into these categories.
And then will we need to add another heading level to split out any sub categories. i.e. in the wiki there is a how-to guide section outlined like this

each link being an individual page. We could probably combine each of those headings into a single grouped index page the way we’re doing the current pages. But they would each have another subfolder in one of the top level folders. i.e. customization\ipxe would have an index.rst that would combine all the pages under FOG PXE/iPXE Menu

But we currently are breaking documents into their own rst files at the heading 2 level, but we probably don’t want a gigantic customization page even with navigation. Perhaps we have some more pages like the root index.

Or maybe we should just follow examples of existing pages like https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/index.html and giving a bigger overview at the top level and maintain the title/sub-title level navigation sections throughout on the left panel.

Just trying to get this right before we’re in too deep and changing it becomes a huge pain.

@Jonathan-Cool Were you able to get the config file deployment to work?

Also, we’re (slowly) moving the documentation to a new home and I started updating the printer management section https://fogproject.readthedocs.io/en/latest/management/index.html#printer-management

@Wayne-Workman Do you know if there are some orphaned wiki pages? Or rather how to find the parent of a wiki page? I’m finding links to pages like this one https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Creating_a_Samba_Based_Printer_Store_on_FOG

Granted this one might need a little updating, but even still I’m not sure where it’s home should be. Should this be in a Knowledge Base Section? A reference section? As far as I know, you’re the resident wiki expert so I thought you might have insights.

@Sebastian-Roth @Tom-Elliott
Am I correct in that we no longer use the mobile versions of pages and we just use responsive css to make the fog management page at least somewhat universally friendly. And that this is meant to be improved more so in the 1.6 UI?
I’m asking in reference to converting this section https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Managing_FOG#Mobile_Management_Interface
I’m thinking that it could all be replaced with just a note about the page using responsive.css.