Posts made by Junkhacker

maybe if i upload them as a text file…

[url=“/_imported_xf_attachments/0/539_instructions.txt?:”]instructions.txt[/url]

i keep trying to give a detailed reply but keep getting blocked by akismet

I’ve been thinking about the pxe configuration file situation, and i’ve come up with a very interesting solution that you will either love or hate. it adds a new feature to fog as well. if we chainboot from pxe to ipxe, the configuration file can be a php file. the computer booting would send it’s mac address (and any other variables you want such as asset tag, serial number, or UUID). this could even free fog from it’s dependance on mac addresses for identifying hosts. the host would boot to ipxe, fog could check the identification info sent for pending tasks, and generate the relevant boot configuration on the fly. the fog server could even be set to automatically run quick host registration on any unrecognized hosts, which could speed up initial deployment of fog servers. thoughts? i’ve been experimenting with this approach, but my php skills aren’t very good. i do have pxe to ipxe chainbooting, with a ipxe php boot menu for http booting isos working at the moment, so i could tell you how to get that part working.

ah, misunderstood. so, would it be difficult to propagate all of the fields of the configuration page with the existing values in pxelinux.0/default ? at present, the only way to check for typos or mistakes in the configuration is to test it or log into the server to look at the file. being able to look at the actual configuration on the configuration page would be very nice.
btw, thanks for all your hard work on fog project

i guess i should have checked, but assumed that when the page gave me a “Master password is null” message that it was an operation failure message. perhaps the Master password field should have a (blank for none) message like the others, instead of the asterisk that implies it is required.

LOW PRIORITY
Interface tweak
not sure if this should be considered a bug, or a feature request, but the “FOG PXE Boot Menu Configuration” page always reverts to defaults. It would be a nice feature if the page would display what Advanced Configuration Options have already been set, and not make you reenter all them every time you want to make a change, as well as not require the password be set every time.

So the “Image Size” is supposed to be how much space it takes up on your server, not how large of a hard disk is required to accept the image? At present, my management console says that my images are roughly twice the size of the files stored on the server. I have Fog running in a virtual computer with a relatively small hard drive assigned to it right now, and if the console was to be believed, my server’s drive is over 100% full.

I do not know how to add the BCD file to the scripts. at present i have been either replacing the system’s BCD file with the one i’ve sent you before i pull the image, or manually replacing it from a a live boot disk environment on the end machine (if i forgot to replace the file before uploading the image to the server). I wish i could find the forum to link to where i found this info, but apparently all sysprep-ed BCD files are the same, one works for all. By replacing the existing BCD file with the one i’ve sent you (which is just a BCD file that has been renamed), Single Partition Resizable works for windows 7, though I’ll admit I’ve only tested it on about 3 computers so far. I have only been using the Single Partition option so far. I was just hoping for maybe a checkbox in the upload and deploy screens for replacing the BCD with the “generalized” file. If you’d like a nice tool for comparing/editing BCD files, I recommend Bootice.

for the User/User Group Management
I can imagine people wanting more control over users beyond a sliding scale “level” of access. But user access control scheme’s get complicated fast. maybe a feature to work on for version 0.34?

btw, is there goals/progress info for the next “stable” release? It would be nice to see a checklist of features/bugs that are to be added, and the progress toward them. It may also help people to know where and what they need to help with.

There are a few things that i think could be added to FOG that could make it much more robust. and i was wondering if there were any plans to add these features.

User Management controls
The ability to restrict fog users and/or groups of fog users to certain types of activities for certain host groups would be very handy.
What I am imagining is a setup where user group “equipment checkout” could re-image their loaner laptops at will, but couldn’t do anything to faculty/staff computers. A user could be allowed to deploy any computer in the “undeployed” computer group but were not allowed the “upload” an image back to the server (and if newly registered hosts could be added to a group by default, it would be even better). A user in the “helpdesk” user group could create tasks of virus scan or memtest, and that is all.
I know this would be complicated and i don’t know if other organizations would use it like i’m suggesting, but i wanted to throw the idea out there.

Image Management
The Image Management page tells you what size an image will be when deployed, but not how much space it is actually taking up on the server, in it’s compressed size. Knowing how much space the image takes up on disk would be handy for managing how full your storage gets.

Generalize BCD while uploading image.
One of the reasons systems have to be sysprep-ed before taking their image with FOG is because the computer will throw a 0xc000000e error otherwise. many people don’t like to do a full sysprep of their image. replacing the BCD file with one that has been “generalized” will prevent this issue. Generalizing the BCD is one of the things sysprep does, and the computer will automatically modify a generalized BCD to it’s proper configuration on next boot. If the existing BCD file on a windows machine is replaced with one like in the zip file attached, the computer should boot fine.

[url=“/_imported_xf_attachments/0/519_generalized-BCD.zip?:”]generalized-BCD.zip[/url]

I just came across this issue, and the listed fix works perfectly, but i noticed that the fog 0.33 code does not include this fix yet. is there any reason why?