Posts made by Julianh

@Junkhacker
Well this was the interesting bit, it was all physical, the MACs imaged up were those of the physical adapters, but Hyper-v was “moving” the physical MACs to it’s internal network cards, and then of course imaging the software MACs up. Interesting, a pain but quite interesting.

I’ve been looking into this, and have spoken to one of our MCT instructors.
The machines I was imaging were Server 2012 R2, with Hyper-v. The Macs were duplicated on all the images. The instructor pointed out that Hyper-v moves the original Mac into software and uses the physical card as a glorified pass through device, so in effect the physical Mac becomes software, which explains how the situation arose.

I hope this helps anyone else imaging 2012 R2 Servers.

Could you mark this as solved and edit the title to “Nasty Problem - Fixed, Don’t get caught out when imaging Hyper-V Hosts”

Hi Wayne,

I have a VMware troubleshooting course to finish off updating, but afterwards I should have some time and more importantly kit free in early May. I could have a go then if that’s ok.

Julian

The machines were built for me, but they use the realtek Lan card on the ASUS A88XM-Plus mother boards, Fog v 1.20 on unbuntu 14.04, 6 core AMDs with 32 GB ram and SSDs.

I was imaging up Server 2012, which normally works fine, one image per Physical server normally. But it’s eating my storage, so I thought I’d try 1 image to multiple servers, looks like I’m buying some more disks.

Hi,

It is all physical, which is why it’s supposed to be impossible.

I had a real pig of a problem today, and wanted to let you all know about it, so you don’t spend as many hours as I do finding it.

The symptoms of a duplicate IP are, one box works, reboot the duplicate IP and the other box works, then the first stops.

I imaged one server then sent the image down to 5 other machines. none of the other machines were accessible across the network, checked all the obvious IPs etc, no joy.

It turned out to be the MAC address. The image had taken the mac address up, and all the imaged servers had the mac address from the source image.

Easy enough to fix by defining a new mac in the adapter’s properties, but a pig to spot.

I hope this helps someone else out there.

Julian

Hi All,

I’ve bought new SSDs for 10 machines, that previously had dual drives in them. I have images of the dual drives machines, that I want to deploy to the new SSD environment.
The second disk was never used in the machines, hopefully there were no boot etc partitions either on it.

I noticed that the images have in them d1.mbr d1p1.img d1p2.img d2.mbr d2p1.img
I wondered if I could simply delete d2.mbr and d2p1.img, then change the image type to single disk.
Would it work? If not any suggestions? I’d rather not rebuild the images if possible.

Thanks

Julian

I fixed it, it was the grapjics card. I swapped it over and now it’s working perfectly.

I spend, not hours, but days on this, eventually I swapped every component with one that worked.

Thanks for all your help, what a weird one!

Could you change this to solved please

Thanks

@Julianh I forgot to say Tom, It’s only this one machine.

@Tom-Elliott
Hi Tom, the Machine is behaving perfectly well, I doubt there’s a memory issue, but I’ll run a check on it anyway. THanks for the suggestion.

Julian

This is the result of the hdparm -I /dev/sda command. I didn’t know what you wanted, so here’s the lot.

This is the end screen.

Thanks you all for getting back to me.

I’ve uploaded a slightly longer video to https://youtu.be/cg5tpB3kq9M
It shows the imaging start, but at the end it fails. I have to wait 12 hours for that though.

Tom, the image continues, as if it were imaging the server, then fails. The imaging will take 12 hours or so it says, it’s 9pm here, so I’ll post the “end” error tomorrow morning.

Sebastian, there is no raid in the microserver. The drive is a samsung 1TB green. If I run the image in “upload - debug” mode, can I run the commands in that mode?

Thanks again for your help. I’ll post the image tomorrow.

Yours

Julian

Hi Sebastian,

I swapped the hard drive, and got the exact same error as in the video, I also left it, but at the end of the supposed imaging rocess, it failed.

What does the error code mean, I have the controller set to AHCI disks,

Thanks

Julian

Hi Sebastian,

I’m working away, so I only had the weekend to try it. I swapped over the hard drive, and then tried the libata.force=noncq option, but unfortunatley it didn’t work.

Do you have any suggestions I could try, or options I could enable?

I’m back home at the weekend, then at home for a couple of weeks. Hopefully we can find the solution then.

Is there ny further information you want?

Thanks

Julian

Hi George,

It’s fog 1.20 in unbuntu 14.04.3 the hardware is a HP micriserver N40l. The bios has the controller as IDE, altough it can go to achi.

I have fog working perfectly on all my servers, all identical, in the immortal words of Bill and Ted “a most bodacious product”

However I have one other server, a HP microserver, old box, Dual core 1.3 Ghz CPU no less! It presents an error initially then starts cloning, with speeds of 350-ish MB, and eventually fails.

The error code is TSC: Fats Calibration failed
then
ata2.00: failed to enable AA (error_mask=0x1)
ata1.00: failed to enable AA (error_mask=0x1)

There is nothing else on the switch, just a Fog server, this microserver and 2 draytek 2860 routers.

A picture is worth a thousand wods, so I uploaded the video of it here

https://youtu.be/Bw8Dq6RJVik

Does anyone have an idea what it is?

Thanks

Julian

t

I ran out of disk space on the data disk today, but couldn’t work out why. I then researched it a bit and found that Linux reserves 5% of the disk in case you start to run out, for the system files. Great idea for system disks, but pointless if you have data disks for say images.
This command removes the reservation from the disk, and gives you back the 5%

sudo tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sdb1

I hope this is useful

Dear all,

I wanted to put up this problem, and it’s solution, as it had me banging my head for ages, tom kindly connected up, and also spent ages trying to debug it.

The problem was one of my machines just stopped downloading images. Obviously you assume it’s the machine, checked the bios for changes, compared it to a working machine, not the bios.
Re imported the machine, no change. In the end I rebuilt the fog server totally, even gparted that partitions to make sure there was nothing left. Still no joy.

Tom suspected it was the disks, had I put then in a raid array? No the disks were each attached to a sata controller, no raid. As Tom put it, “it’s the disks”.

By now I’m getting concerned, as courses are scheduled and I can’t restore the correct images, not a career move.

I decided to check the disks were working by installing 2008R2. I started the install, it saw the disks, but when it started copying files it initially paused for ages, as if it couldn’t access the disks. But it did, a delay of 3-4 minutes, create the partition.

I then tried downloading an image from fog and it worked perfectly, and has been doing so since I installed 2008 that was subsequently over written.

So what caused it? I re initialised the partition table before all this, and I wonder if somehow there was some form of corruption in it.

I hope this helps someone, and many thanks to Tom for his help and “it’s the disks” comment

Could someone mark it as solved please

Julian

Thanks Tom, it’s version1.20