Hi Everyone,

I have an interesting query that I’ve been googling and searching the forum for but have come up rather empty handed. Please allow me to explain the situation. Here at my office we are venturing into using a VDI platform but we are a non-profit so we don’t want to spend a lot of money on new hardware like nice thin clients. So we want to reuse our old desktops as thin clients with a minimal OS (probably linux based) that we won’t have to put a lot of effort into maintaining security and software updates. Ideally it will boot directly to a VMware Horizons View Client with nothing else on the screen. I’ve found a pre-build openSuSe distro at [URL=‘http://susestudio.com’]susestudio.com[/URL] which seems nearly perfect!

The problem with this build or any build of linux for that matter is that when booting from network it can’t locate the system files because its looking for them on a local drive. Ubuntu has a live network boot but I’m not sure how I can make it work with Fog? The alternative would be to use the Ubuntu method with a different PXE server. I’m trying to avoid having to use a separate PXE server. iPXE seems flexible enough that this should be doable but I’m not a linux expert and I’m not a iPxe expert either I’m more intermediate on both.

The goal is to get a minimal linux build with the client that we could live boot via PXE so if we needed to modify the build or update it we could do so and simply put the new build on the PXE server and everyone would immediately boot to the new build on restart. Keeping in mind the real OS they will be using will be the VDI they will be remoting to from this build.

Info of my setup if you think its relevant-
I’ve got the latest Fog 1.2.0 on an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS x64 box with a standard install using internal storage only and an external DHCP server.

I have managed to add ISO’s to the advanced menu and boot from them but like I mentioned before they don’t finish booting because they try to find files where they don’t exist due to it booting from network.

Any help or idea’s or a step by step just for dummy’s guide would be appreciated! o_O

Thanks guys,
Keith

[quote=“Keith Gregory, post: 34636, member: 23786”]I’ve done this successfully by running the clonezilla image (push it to a machine) and shutting down upon completion (before system reboots and sets up windows). Then simply upload the image by booting from the NIC into iPXE with your task scheduled immediately to upload the image from that source machine.[/quote]

I should also note that this means that if you didn’t already have the Fog service installed on the image it won’t auto-rename or join to your domain.

I’ve done this successfully by running the clonezilla image (push it to a machine) and shutting down upon completion (before system reboots and sets up windows). Then simply upload the image by booting from the NIC into iPXE with your task scheduled immediately to upload the image from that source machine.

I like your idea of booting into a pre-boot environment to do minor changes; however it seems like you are taking are hard approach at doing this when you could be creating your image with virtual box using snapshots at each major step so if you miss something or mess something up you can just revert the snapshot. Its still a timely and daunting process to create an image this way but it takes out the headaches of having to start from scratch each time. Then each time you think you have it right or after each modification you simply upload your new image over your old one.

Didn’t see your replies load until I posed my own answer, but thanks everyone for the assistance!

I answered my own question… I didn’t think to check storage management and sure enough the ip address setting was listed there. I updated the IP and now all it well!

Hi everyone, this is my first post so I hope I’m putting it in the correct location.

I was running .32 on ubuntu 12.04 but once I seen the newest version was 1.1.2 or something like that I decided I wanted the new version. Instead of upgrading I decided creating a new server and run my two servers side by side till the new one was fully tested and configured. (I only have one image and little AD configuration so no big deal)

The new box was setup no problem with Ubuntu 14.04 and FOG 1.1.2 with everything working but I was having issues with the auto-rename and joining to the domain but this might be partially my image as well. I noticed some issues with the new configuration for AD such as not being able to use an OU for a group other than the default from a drop menu.

The latest version of FOG 1.2.0 was released a day or so later. This time rather than do a fresh install I opted for the upgrade considering this wasn’t a major update where as the last one was. My server is running on our Vsphere infrastructure so I simply created a snapshot before going through with the update.

The update went fine and all seems to be okay except my server cannot locate the default storage which is internal to the server. This is because I modified the IP address to be that of my original fog server and I cannot find the location of the IP to set for the storage configuration.

Can someone direct me where to look to set the ip for the storage? I’ve already checked /opt/fog/.fogsettings and its not there. I figure this must be in the apache config somewhere?

Thanks in advance for any help, I’ve had this problem in the past as well but I cannot remember the solution as it was a few years ago.