https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/a727a8/fog_appreciation_post/

@Jbob said:

Tom is just … Tom.

that’s like saying: Superman is just … Superman.

trunk 7609? is there a reason you upgraded to a release that’s almost 2 months old? i think this has been fixed already.

@wanderson fog 0.32 was released in 2011. i’m afraid none of us know how to support it. it may be time to upgrade or migrate to a new install of fog. there have been far more than enough improvements to be worth it. your existing images will be compatible with the latest version of fog (as legacy images. if you migrate to a new server instead of upgrading a few setting will need to be set to recognize them properly, but they will work)

don’t forget to get the proper licensing. you can’t capture an OEM image and redeploy it to other computers and be in compliance with Microsoft’s licensing. you’ll need a volume license.
once you have an imaging server, you’ll find yourself using it a lot more than you think. user has a virus? a few hours to repair, or a few minutes to reimage, etc.

@VincentJ default compression level is 6. testing found that it had the best compression/performance ratio for us. i don’t think many people change it.

@Junkhacker to clarify, your new “default” menu item would contain something like this:

iseq ${serial} <labSerial1> &&  goto chainboot ||
iseq ${serial} <labSerial2> &&  goto chainboot ||
goto fog.local

:chainboot
set net0/next-server <otherPXEbootServerIP> && set filename <whateverFile> && chain 
tftp://<otherPXEbootServerIP>/<whateverFile> ||
exit

@dwagner sounds like you need to recreate the /images/dev/postinitscripts directory, and it’s contents, a single file named “fog.postinit” with the contents

#!/bin/bash
## This file serves as a starting point to call your custom pre-imaging/post init loading scripts.
## <SCRIPTNAME> should be changed to the script you're planning to use.
## Syntax of post init scripts are
#. ${postinitpath}<SCRIPTNAME>

permissions 777
also, you’ll need to create an empty file named “.mntcheck” in /images/dev too, if you haven’t

@george1421 this one? https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/9396/stopping-web-service-failed/8?page=1

ok, here are my pseudo scientific results:

pigz vs pzstd (parallel implementation of zstandard, experimental)
tests were performed using a windows 7 image
(larger of 2 partitions only)
uncompressed image file size:34650439624

(de)compression tests were performed as closely as i could to emulate fog’s operation methods (without doing too much work :P). files were cat-ed from a mounted nfs share and piped into the programs, with results saved to an SSD. test machine was running Lubuntu instead of a custom FOS init, because i’m lazy.

pigz -6 compression
duration: 6:06
file size: 17548659028

pigz -6 decompression
duration: 6:00

pzstd default (3?) compression
duration: 5:16
file size: 16967988207

pzstd decompression default compression file
duration: 3:17

pzstd -6 compression
duration: 6:11
file size: 16247155611

pzstd decompression -6 compression file
duration: 3:16

pzstd -9 compression
duration: 10:00
file size: 16084180231

pzstd decompression -9 compression file
duration: 3:21

Edited to add zst compression level 6

fog works by mounting it’s storage on the systems it’s imaging as an nfs share. you would be exporting a mounted nfs share over nfs… systems don’t like that. and you have to modify the default (sane) settings to allow it to happen.

@brakcounty that would not alter that screen. that would display “Hello <contents of first field>” on the next screen after hitting enter

@jra correct

@jra you don’t

no longer needed. it wasn’t very good encryption when we did use it either.

@george1421 said in OS Support - the numbers are in:

Finally on my campus we are slowly moving away form Centos to Debian as the platform of choice for new installs of linux.

Just wanted to chime in that my campus is almost exclusively Debian as well. except fog, because i installed it on Ubuntu when i was just getting started, and because Ubuntu is for beginners*.

Personally i have preferred Debian over CentOS because of the incredibly stable Enterprise Linux that is RHEL/CentOS has always been so slow to get performance/feature enhancements.
I prefer Debian over Ubuntu because it doesn’t break things as often changing things for the sake of change, lol.

*(joking, obviously. mostly.)

log4j is a java library that is sometimes packaged with a program without it being installed on it’s own, so it doesn’t have to show up in the apt list to be present. that said, george is right that fog doesn’t use java, so you don’t have to worry about it there.

@richard-wise if you go the route of using an external csv file, might i suggest putting it in the /images/postdownloadscripts directory of the fog server? it’s a location that will be mounted anyway

@g-sivakolunthu while possible, it’s not what fog is made for and you would have a bunch of manual steps. you might want to look at clonezilla for imaging with online images possibly in combination with gparted for partition resizing.

@florent in my alternate setup, only the machine you use to upload images to fog would need NFS enabled. the hosts you deploy to would not.

@george1421 i have had in the past fog working without NFS completely (for downloads. uploading images to fog still required NFS, but that’s easier to lock down since you can limit access by IP or whatever for your image source machine)

if there’s any interest, i have ideas on how to re-implement fogtorrent (fog imaging using bit-torrent) though my time to participate in it’s developent (and skill level) are limited/