Posts made by Matt Harding

Put those settings in (Remember to make note of what you do in case you need to take it out again).

Register a client PC with fog through the web frontend, set it to PXE boot, then see if it boots from network and shows you a FOG menu. If you get the fog menu, its worked.

Not sure how it works with uploading but have a read, and at the very least, you can always register the one machine with fog for uploading purposes

You may want to look at Capone

[url]http://www.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/Plugins:_Capone[/url]

Would running the fog client service as Administrator cure this I wonder?

I was hoping to see your dhcpd.conf file on your dhcp server. When you say you had no luck I take it then that you mean you couldn’t get onto it to alter the config? I thought perhaps you meant that you had tried unsuccessfully to modify it.

Have you used Wireshark before? Great tool for finding out whats going on at the heart of a network. I think it’d come in real handy for you in dealing with this issue too. Give it a go. If you’ve never used it before it can seem very complicated and overwhelming, but its quite straight forward for beginner use anyhow. Install it, run it, and select your chosen interface to watch on near the top left. Once you’ve done that it will immediately start live capture of packets.

What I suggest you do is run this on a machine on your network to observe what is happening, and while its running, try to boot another PC from the network. Watch for packets of the DHCP variety. You’ll see them come up under the DHCP Protocol, and in the INFO field next to it will be “DHCP Request” followed by a couple of “DHCP Discover” entries. Click on the discover line(s) and take a closer look in the main information window below the list (bottom half of the screen). Somewhere down there will be an entry that says “Bootp flags” and within that will be the line “Next Server IP address”. If there is nothing there but “0.0.0.0 (0.0.0.0)” then your dhcp server is not giving out bootp addresses which is what gives a network booting machine the ability to talk to fog’s tftp server.

In short if you only get 0.0.0.0 there then your good to go and can use the dhcp proxying method of supplying the extra details. If it does pick up an address, you really need to get in touch with the people who maintain the system giving out the addresses and explain your situation because if its giving bootp addressing out, its not directing you where you need to go, and you cant change it.

Hope I haven’t confused you too much

I’m sure there’s easier ways to say what I’m trying to get accross and perhaps if you are still in need of help with this, someone can convey in a more human friendly way the essence of what I am trying to get across.

Oh incidentally the URL for the wireshark download is:

[url]http://www.wireshark.org/download.html[/url]

Can you post your configs here? I’m not saying I’ll be able to help as I dont use a DHCP Proxy myself, I have full control over my DHCP setup so I’ve no need of one, but there are plenty of people on this forum with loads of experience that may spot the problem straight away.

Time for a dhcp proxy. I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark here and assume you are running FOG on Ubuntu. If not, the info will still be handy at least.

Try this: [url]https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuLTSP/ProxyDHCP[/url]

If anyone is interested, I’ve put together a snapin to change the resolution on a PC. It uses 12noon’s Display Changer which is free for personal and educational use. I’m happy to share the information with anyone needing a windows 7 solution.

You can deploy a snapin to a single machine, or you can deploy all snapins to a bunch of machines… but what I cant seem to do is deploy a new snapin I create to a whole room of PCs at once without either manually setting them one machine at a time, or deploying all snapins, then going into the active snapins and cancelling all the ones I dont want.

Would be nice to select a group and single snapin deploy to the group in one hit.

Thanks

How did you try to create a static IP? Can you talk us through what you did so that we might be able to show you where you went wrong perhaps?

Mine is displaying an hour behind the real time. I have a feeling that its just set by default to GMT. I’m in the UK but we’re still on BST (British Summer Time) at the moment. Still… it’ll be right for me 6 months of the year I suppose

Seriously though, did either of you two find a fix for it?

I’d really like to thank all the hard working people for making this project possible. 4-5 months ago I wasn’t even aware of its awesome features, power and efficiency in what it does… I was happily using clonezilla server. When I decided I’d take a look at Fog though, I totally wrote off clonezilla server and jumped straight to Fog. Its AWESOME! Really is.

I do wonder one thing though. Has the screen resolution feature problem been resolved? I dont know if it is a problem on XP but it doesn’t work for me in 7. Its a minor issue anyhow as I have a snapin that fixes the issue.

I’m literally quite excited at the thought of a new version to test out though… I guess thats when you know your a geek… when the thought of software you like having a new version number in front of it makes you excited!

Is this something that is planned on being fixed any time soon as I can see this being a real issue for some people, my self included. I am having to go around each of my client machines after builds and manually set this in the classrooms. I suppose I could install something in snapin form to deal with it but it’d be really nice to have it work

I have no idea what OS is on the CIPA Filter and sniffing around on the web makes it seem to me that it’s a linux based proprietary OS.

If you can get to a dhcpd.conf file on it the options you would be looking for would be as follows:

next-server 10.0.175.162;
filename “pxelinux.0”;

Note the filename end of .0 is a zero.

If you find you can’t get to it then you could use proxydhcp as chad-bisd suggested… which you can run from your fog server.

Ah ok now I see. You are wanting to actually back up files before a reinstall/refresh of the OS onto the customers PC. ok and I can see why you’d want to get into the image… I presume it’s to put the customers files on with the computer refresh.

What I’d be inclined to do if I were you is just set up a samba share somewhere on your network and back up customer files to it. I know its not the solution you wanted but other than using a Live linux CD, mounting the shares on the network and then copying customer data that way its all that springs to mind right now. You could perhaps write a snapin for fog that copies customer data to and from the server you save the data to, but that would require you to be using the fog client to automate it.

I dont know how practical it is to make the customer responsible for their own data but the shop I used to work at as a technician many years ago had a policy on customer data that did just that. And jobs that came in where a customer needed someone to save their personal data was billed as a seperate item. Again, dont know how practical that is but its all that springs to mind

I’m not sure I can see why you’d need to do that George? I may have misunderstood the point to your question but I figured you were perhaps a little confused as to how the system worked. Apologies if I was mistaken. What is the end goal? I’m just trying to understand what you hope to achieve and perhaps I might then have some more suggestions.

I used to use Clonezilla for this. I switched to Fog for practical reasons as I run a small network in a college department for a cisco academy, but before I used Fog I’d been using Clonezilla server. I think what you probably need to look into is setting up a TFTP server for PXE boot and installing Clonezilla for PXE. If you want to keep it real simple just get a CD burned of clonezilla and use that to back up to an SMB share, ssh account or whatever.

If you can however invest the time, I think you’ll find that Fog can be very beneficial to you. Once set up there is an option on PXE boot that will allow machines to be registered on the system (Full inventory) that will not only allow the client PC to upload its current OS once the system knows of its existence, but it will also allow you to keep a record of that machines inventory. Most of the functionality of Fog would probably not be of real interest to you in that environment but since its quick imaging you’re after your in luck… Fog is brilliant at that, and very easy to set up. There are a number of guides around that people have written. I would suggest (and this is from plenty of experience over the summer playing with a Fog set up) that you start by getting yourself a copy of Ubuntu Server 10.04 and then grabbing Fog 0.32

I’ve found that putting this version of Fog on that particular version of Ubuntu is the most stable combination. And I’ve tried a few out.

If you need help with it there are plenty of people here that are more than willing to lend a hand. Me included.

Hope this helps.

Quick question. Why in particular do you need a proxy dhcp server? What DHCP server are you running?

I’m only curious because I am using 2 PXE boot servers in my environment off the back of 1 Windows 2003 based DHCP server.

In the college I work at I’m a network technician in one department and network administrator and only technician in a smaller department, the latter of which has virtually no budget, so I have to scrimp and scrape what I can together and any server hardware is donated from the main department I work in. Consequently I came across fog about 4 months back. I previously used DRBL server with clonezilla to image the 34 machines for our Cisco academy network but switched to fog 0.32 before the summer. The no budget aspect means the most powerful machine I could have is a core i5 2500 quad core, 16GB ram, with 3x 1TB drives in RAID5 setup.

Software wise the host OS is Slackware 13.37 x64 and I’m running Virtualbox 4.1 to host 4 virtual PCs. I wasn’t really sure that Virtualbox was up to the job of running a fog server before the summer but after extensive testing under loads it can quite comfortably support my Ubuntu Server 10.04 / fog 0.32 setup.

I just thought I’d add my 2 pennies (2 cents as the Americans say) worth as I’ve not seen many people using Virtualbox to host things like this. I’m very comfortable relying on it though for the conditions I work in with this smaller network.

Anyone else using fog on Virtualbox?? I’d love some feedback on your experiences.