Posts made by Lethal Kebab

we deploy to 1000 computers every 12 weeks… never syspreped once… is that bad??

Hi guys,

Since I bonded my server nics, I no longer get the front page stats.

I converted all the locations in the web GUI that specify eth0 with bond0 but all I get is the ip info box and spinning cogs of death for the HDD stats and bandwidth.

Any ideas?

Are there config files that don’t update nic change that I need to update manually?

[quote=“Tom Elliott, post: 17763, member: 7271”]I don’t think so. PXE in it’s native form doesn’t do anything bios related, however, there are PXE based EFI configurations out there from some of the research I’ve looked into.[/quote]

This seems very viable…no??

[url]https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UEFI/PXE-netboot-install[/url]

[quote=“Tom Elliott, post: 17758, member: 7271”]As I’m relatively new and mainly been working on the GUI, I’ll try seeing if I can update my init.gz file to test around with EFI a little bit. The kernel’s that I’ve been building have already included support for EFI, so it may just be a matter of … finally … switching to partclone to get true UEFI support imaging. Again, I’m new so it may not work right away and may take a little bit more time, but I will try and keep trying until I get it for you all. I will, as per usual, request others to test out as well as all I’ve got is a VM that I can tell to use EFI for bootup.[/quote]

Hey Tom

That would be awesome… All new devices are being churned out with UEIF bios, and when they start becoming cheaper, then the ability to boot in non UEfi mode will diminish…

Does this also mean that you would not be able to pxe boot anymore?

the FUN just keeps on coming…

DAY 3
Decided to bond the NIC’s

again… googled the hell out of it, surprisingly, there is no result for Fedora 15 nic bonding, save the official docs from Fedora that clearly articulates how to achieve bonding…

HOWEVER, not once did they mention that you needed to chkconfig NetworkManager off, nor did they mention to service NetworkManager Stop…
They failed to mention that when bond0 comes up, for some reason eth1 still holds an ip address, and that ifdown eth1 then ifup eth1 gets it to behave… then ifdown bond0 followed by ifup bond0…

they failed to mention the horror when you can no longer ping anything… not even the router even though all settings in the ifcfg file are correct and you’ve quadruple checked ifconfig -a output…

endless googling finally reveals that “perhaps” you may need to add a route by tying route add default gw 192.168.x.x dev bond0 which doesn’t seem to persist on network restarts…

suffice it to say, blowing away the server and re-installing crossed my mind on several occasions…

the result???

I have internet access but I can only ping computers on the same subnet, all other computers on any subnet can ping me… thats fine for now because imaging is working… again…

note to self… charge more for this $h!t in future…

[quote=“Todd Holte, post: 17741, member: 141”]Did you convert the GPT Disk to MBR Disk? I used “AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard Edition 5.2” its free for private and commercial use. [url]http://www.disk-partition.com/download-home.html[/url][/quote]

Hey Todd

I actually resolved this issue today…

I originally did convert the GPT disk to MBR disk, however, it was still giving me the same errors.

The eventual setup that worked was the following:

Boot into windows 7 install disk, and shit + f10 on the first screen before you start the install process, blow away the partitions etc and create a new one so that you can have a single partition windows 7 install.

I then decided to use single disk, single partition to upload the image, thats when FOG told me that no partitions can be located. It turns out, there is a post on this forum (which I can no longer find for some reason) I found while googling the error message which led me to a free tool called fixpart (there is a windows version) that you download and run on the computer with the following steps:

fixpart.exe 0:

it then immediately told me that there were left over GPT signatures on the drive mixed in with the MBR and that it would take care of them if I pressed Y.

After that, i committed the changes with “w”, it wrote the new MBR, I rebooted and presto… the image got taken up.

after I deployed it back to another laptop, the image went down fine however fog complained that partition 2 to 5 were missing but wasnt bombing out with IO errors like before… it then said task completed and it rebooted into windows 7…

so happy days!!

[quote=“Axel, post: 12528, member: 686”]So I spent 10+ hours today trying to get this to work. I’ve followed multiple tutorials on using an external NFS share and my results are not good. After I configure the NFS share in FOG the web GUI says unable to connect on the front page where usually the space free/used is displayed. I’ve created the NFS share, remade /images mounted my NFS share in FOG on /images, created the .mntcheck and then the /dev folder with .mntcheck inside it. I’ve made sure to chmod -R fog:root /images. When uploading an image once the process gets to send method-nfs I get an error of mount: 192.168.62.125:mnt/nfsdata/dev/ failed, reason given by server : Permission denied
mount: mounting 192.168.62.125:/mnt/nfsdata/dev/ on /images failed bad file descriptor. I’ve even tried following posts on here where people had similar issues and i’ve had no luck. The fog server is a vm running in Proxmox with bridged networking. Any ideas?[/quote]

hey Axel

not sure if you resolved your issue, post is too long… didn’t read all of it…

however, I have noticed two things that may be causing your issue…

the first… you used chmod -R fog:root /images… when it should be chown -R fog:root /images (perhaps you meant to type that…)
the second, in your screen shots for the storage node section, the password field should resemble the password in plain text, not the encrypted type… try changing to your normal password, save and try that…

I always issue (right or wrong) the following commands on the /images folder…
chmod -R 777 /images
chown -R fog:root /images

but that’s just me…

also… try restarting the multicast service… sounds trivial, but when multicast bombs for me… (ie stuck on the please wait screen) I restart the service and it works…

yes… unless that computer name exists in AD already, you will not get GPO’s either… no?

hey guys…

could possibly be unrelated… but…
we were having issues with TFTP Timeout when it came to subnets other than the one fog was on… it turns out the switch needed configuration to allow spanning subnets (not sure on exact terminology but 5 minutes after the network guy worked on the core switch, it was working).

the bad descriptor problem, I resolved by making sure that .mntcheck was in both the /images and in the /images/dev folder…

good luck… let us know how you go…

Hey guys… sincerely appreciate the work, however, I must point out that prior to main release, fog 0.33 must be able to deal with UEFI bios… we have just purchase 100 HP650 laptops and they are junk… their bios has an option to go legacy mode, but its not real… after blowing away the original install, and fdisk to only get 1 partition windows 7 install, fog still uploads 3 partitions for some reason, on putting the image back, it says that it cannot find partition 3 4 and 5 and then bombs with IO errors…

I truly believe fog needs UEFI compatibility for it to remain viable…

Ok… after much gnashing of teeth… the server is now up and fogging laptops… however, let me describe the pain involved…

Day 1:
Windows server 2003 - decommissioned and awaiting my Fedora 15 live ISO…
CD Spins up, auto boot… server hangs…

Take 2
CD Spins up, boot with less gfx option. That works, and I begin the installation process.
Drives selected, I can see the SAN drives - RADI 5, the local RAID which is RAID 1 configuration. Installation bombs saying unhandled exception error.
Googling reveals that Fibre has to be disconnected or it may cause errors in the setup process…
Take 3
This time, disconnect the fibre prior to booting and all goes well, partitions are created and boot loader is installed. Reboot the machine to be confronted by "no boot disk, please insert and press any key… "

Take 4
Same as take 3, but this time, it boots and I’m in Fedora… YAY!
yum update is downloading 410mb at 2.5kb/s… WTF?? lol…
During updates, I load the multipath driver (after extensive googling)
kill the update process, install fog…
fog bombs on php-gettext, google some more and make edits to the functions.sh file to remove the culprit.
fog completes the set up, we change the DHCP server to point to the new fog server and… TFTP permissions issue… all suggested fixes on this site and others do not yield a result… not to worry, i’ll fix it tomorrow…
restart updates and leave the updates running over night at 2.5kb/s (while browsing and other internet activity are at lightning speeds).

DAY 2
Updates are finished, hoping the TFTP issue will resolve itself (magically) post reboot and to ensure updates are applied, I reboot the server and …
multipath has decided to take over the local RAID and now fedora wont boot…
googling reveals that I should have black listed the local raid with its WWID in the multipath.conf file… wish I had read that before frying the damned thing and re-installing fedora 15…
this time, even more googling (we are now up to a cumulative total of 5 hours of solid googling) reveals the magical command that reveals this WWID for the local raid, because the conventional one wasn’t working (multipath -v2)… scsi_id -g -u /block/xxx reveals the WWID and I add it to the black list… 4:00pm and fog appears to be up and running smoothly…
mounting the /images folder was a pain and several issues with permissions, mount point does not exist… yada yada yada… 5:00pm, I take up the first image… at a blistering 4.31GiB’s …

Still left to do:
Team the Ethernet Cards (when I tried to do it on day one following the tutorial in here, I just ended up losing the ability to browse internet, and connection would come in and out).
Permanently mount the SAN to /images at boot time (you would be surprised the problems you get when you try to fstab it).

if anyone is interested, I am happy to put up a tutorial on WHAT NOT TO DO… when embarking on such a setup!!

Hi Tom

Awesome Job dude… sincerely appreciate it…

is there a list of outstanding matters for 0.33? perhaps someone here can assist with something on that list…

[quote=“chad-bisd, post: 16729, member: 18”]Does RAID 0+1 have better read speeds than RAID5? The majority of the work will be read, so pick the fastest disk organization that also has redundancy.

Will you primarily be multicasting or unicasting?

Do you have any experience with Jumbo frames so you have a working knowledge?

How much free time do you have to learn all this new stuff or do you need to have a working system asap?[/quote]

I believe RAID 0+1 is RAID 0 with Mirror, theoretically, RAID 0 is the fastest no? I am open to suggestions…

Multicasting vs unicasting is about even…

I have tried jumbo frames before to no avail… i have enabled jumbo frames on the switches and then booted fog in debug mode, enabled jumbo frames on the PC and continued with FOG, but i didnt see any improvements… was hoping someone else had some experience…

I’ll be installing on Monday and need to start imaging by Tuesday, I will try and post some screen shots of the speeds I am getting…

Hi Guys,

The school I contract to for the purpose of imaging their computers during their breaks have finally decided to decommission a server and give it to me in order to install FOG on it. Previously, we were imaging approx. 1000 computers / laptops with a shitty little Lenovo laptop (getting speeds up to 5gb / min!!).

Now I will be installing FOG on a dual Xenon dual core server @ 2.ghz with 4GB of RAM, dual G/Bit NIC and DUAL fibre to the SAN.

I am proposing to do Bond the NICs in a BOND 0 configuration and place the images on the SAN on a RAID 0+1 setup.

We are looking to break land speed records here, all their switches are brand new HP procurve, and the entire school is connected via 20G/Bit Fibre between buildings.

What else can I tinker with to achieve max speed on image deployment?

I am considering

1. Jumbo Frames (anyone had any success?)
2. Decompression of the image on the client end rather than the server end.
3. Can I trunk the fibre channels???

any other ideas ?

Fog 0.32 will be used along with Fedora 15 64bit

Hi Paul

Does TFTP work with other computers and only this one fails?

The only time I’ve seen is happen if there is no connectivity to the fog server due to a switch issue or my fog server has gone a little cactus.

Try rebooting fog server and see if it works, if not, try connecting another computer which you know works with fog into the same port and if that fails as well then your problem is located from that port onwards and not fog.

As I understand it, multicast is a form of broadcast which means that it will be sent to all nodes attached to that switch and on the same vlan.

What has an effect on speed is everything In between. Ie a cat 5 cable that snuck in there by accident, a FUBAR nic on one of the hosts etc etc.

IGMP allows the broadcast traffic to be directed towards those in the multicast session, rather than every device on the vlan.

After a switch upgrade, cabling and patching upgrade to make sure the lab was completely revamped, my multicast speed to 30 computers went from 500MiB/ min to 4.01GiB/Min.

The culprit was a dodgy patch on one of e hosts.

You can spend thousands on switching, but if you have a dodgy $5 patch, or a cat 5 cable in the mix etc, your multicast speeds will suffer.

[quote=“Fatikis, post: 13011, member: 7852”]I’m having the same problem with the exact same model of computer, and I’m newish to FOG. We recently ordered these computers all with windows7 preinstalled.

This may be a silly question, but if I do a fresh install of windows 7 on the computer and upload a new image will I be able to image the computers with the 3 partitions?[/quote]

I am assuming you mean that with a fresh install and default 2 partitions created by windows 7 install, can you the take the image up and deploy it to a computer of the same make and model that currently has 3 partitions?

If that is so, then yes you can. The partitions on the client computer will be deleted and you will end up with the same number of partitions that are on your image.

I don’t know… I’ve never tried to be honest

Also, if the switches are managed, ensure Igmp snooping is enabled and igmp querier is also enabled, this will restrict multicast traffic to just the members of the multicast session rather than every device on the vlan. The slow down could be, as mentioned above, a slow device which takes it’s time to drop packets that are not intended for it.