Posts made by moss

To be honest, I don’t know a huge amount about SCCM or the way it PXE boots. Chain-loading would probably be the way I would go.

The suggestion above wouldn’t work as hes wanting to network boot from another PXE server. It may be possible using a menu option but I suspect you would have to load some software to do so as PXE booting is handled by the network card.

As much as I’m looking forward to 0.33, I’m happy with 0.32 which I’ve been using since release without any major issues. I would imagine juggling life/work/time dedicated to this project must be hard, I know i’d struggle to give much time.
If the project ever does die off, there’s always the possibility of it being forked.

It did take me a good few minutes to work out how to deploy multicast, I’ve not tried your changes but it does sound like an improvement. Maybe something that could be implemented in the new version.

Due to the way we work, once a machine is imaged the hostname changer service setting needs to be disabled.
I have been doing this two different ways, initially I was using an SQL event setup through PHPMyAdmin running the following every evening:
[CODE]UPDATE moduleStatusByHost SET msState=0 WHERE msModuleID=‘hostnamechanger’[/CODE]
I’ve had a few issues with the event scheduler turning itself off, so I’ve since moved to a cronjob running the same command piped into an SQL/bash script.

This had been working fine, however, I’ve just noticed that if I run the following:
[CODE]SELECT * FROM moduleStatusByHost WHERE msState LIKE ‘1’[/CODE]
I get no results returned and actually looking at the moduleStatusByHost table, every msState field is set to 0. However in the web interface, numerous hosts do have this option selected. I’ve even ran:
[CODE]UPDATE moduleStatusByHost SET msState=0[/CODE]
Even through the database shows its disabled, the service is definitely enabled for some hosts, if I change the hostname on one of these hosts, Fog renames them back.
If I disable then re-enable the service through the web interface for a host, then re-run the SQL script to disable it, it works as it should.

It seems as if the SQL database and the Web interface are out of sync, even though Fog seems to operate as normal with regards to imaging etc.
Does anyone have any ideas what could cause this?
Thanks!

Try the following fix:
[url]http://fogproject.org/forum/threads/cannot-create-tasks-task-manager-blank.3823/#post-9593[/url]

There’s a good chance that most potential employers wont have heard of fog, however the skills associated with fog/deployment are likely to be very beneficial.
Explaining that you can switch to an open source deployment solution from an existing (potentially expensive) deployment solution and at the same time probably increase the speed at which machines can be deployed.
If you’re primarily a Windows technician, having some basic Linux skills can help career prospects too.
In both my previous and current role, I’ve switched the organisation away from slow, expensive commercial solutions to Fog and everyone has been pleased with the results.

What did you use to create the images you have on the different hard drive?

Here’s a few pictures. (I’ll link as I know many organisations block dropbox)

[URL=‘https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6242590/FogPi/fogpi.jpg’]RaspberryPi[/URL]
[URL=‘https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6242590/FogPi/upload.jpg’]Upload[/URL]
[URL=‘https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6242590/FogPi/uploadgraph.jpg’]UploadGraph[/URL]
[URL=‘https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6242590/FogPi/deploy.jpg’]Deploy[/URL]
[URL=‘https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6242590/FogPi/deploygraph.jpg’]DeployGraph[/URL]
[URL=‘https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6242590/FogPi/deploygraph2.jpg’]DeployGraph2[/URL]

edit: Sorry, seem to have linked the full size images for the deployment ones.

I’ve managed to install Fog to a 512mb Raspberry Pi using the latest Raspbain image.
I don’t have any spare external hard drives at the minute so the images folder is mounted on a 16gb Corsair Flash Voyager GT USB drive (ext3 filesystem). I’m using a netbook to access the Fog webUI, so there’s no need to bring up a resource hungry GUI on the Raspberry Pi and a laptop with a clean W7x64 install as the client machine. These are all connected through a Cisco ASA acting as a switch. I did initially try using a crossover cable directly to the host but the dhcp service failed to start during boot if the client wasn’t active/up.

Fog installed as normal but a few errors occurred whilst actually trying to use Fog. The first was the Task Management page returned a blank page when I tried upload an image. This page, solved that problem:
[url]http://fogproject.org/forum/threads/cannot-create-tasks-task-manager-blank.3823/[/url]

The other problem I had was a permissions error on the client when mounting the NFS share just before the image upload started. The cause of this issue was the portmap service not starting properly on boot. To solve this, I installed portmap and made it run at startup:
[CODE]sudo apt-get install portmap[/CODE] this produced some errors but it seems to work ok, then ran:
[CODE]sudo update-rc.d rpcbind enable[/CODE]

I uploaded an image and the speed averaged around 490MiB/min, it took about 15mins to upload an 8GiB image. The upload/ process does seem to hang quite a lot, this could be down to using a USB flash drive as the images target. The deployment is much more stable, seems to average between 750/850MiB/min, again the flash drive could be the limiting factor here. It took about 9mins to restore the same image.

I’m not able to try it with more hosts as I don’t have any other Windows machines, I primarily run Linux on all my computers (ext4 filesystem so they’re incompatible with Fog). I’ve got a few pictures of the process which I’ll upload once I’ve resized them.

So it seems that a Raspberry Pi will deploy a single machine reasonably well, personally I’d still use a laptop with a Fog virtual machine.

As said in the earlier post, its not something I’ve ever tried, but I could give it a shot.
I still don’t think its a great idea, a laptop running a Fog virtual machine (or a dedicated physical install) would be a much better solution.

I’ve only ever seen this happen on fast Ethernet connections, as soon as Gigabit Ethernet was used there was no dropouts.

I’ve got two Raspberry Pi’s, an original 256mb and a 512mb model, but I’ve never considered running Fog from one. I think the main bottlenecks are going to be the speeds are which hard drives can be read (I assume you would be using an external USB drive?) and the lack of gigabit LAN. I had a performance issues with Fog when using 100MBit/s LAN.

Glad you managed to sort it, SQL is also on my ever-growing list of things to learn.

I don’t have access to FOG/SQL at the minute as I only use it at work, but this part of the query:
[CODE]ON groupMembers.gmGroupID = groups.groupID[/CODE]
Was what I used also pull the group names in from the groups table. So I’m sure you would have to include a modified version of this as part of your PHP/SQL query.

I definitely get different outputs from the two queries, the 2nd query gives the extra group name fields etc. I’m not sure what format etc the upload report requires but I would do it manually by copying an existing predefined report and editing the source code.
Hopefully someone else can confirm this, but I believe the existing reports are located:
/var/www/fog/management/reports
A custom report building module would be a nice feature but I’m not sure if I have time to try and build one (or if I even have the ability to do so).

I personally don’t know of any imaging software which supports ZFS. Jumpstart is the only thing I know which can provide network deployment for Solaris, but its a network based install as opposed to image deployment.

I’ve not tried Solaris, it’ll definitely work with Windows 7/NTFS images. As far as I’m aware Fog only supports ext2/3 for Unix/Linux based Operating Systems and I believe Solaris uses ZFS by default?

Are you hoping to boot Windows 7/Solaris over the network using PXE or deploy new W7/Solaris machines based upon built images? The way I’ve read your post it seem like you’re after the first, which Fog isn’t really designed to do, although can do it in a limited way.

I’ve never used snap-ins, you’re probably better off starting a new thread to attract the attention of those who have.
Just guessing, could it be a host firewall issue?