Best posts made by need2

I am happy to say that as of at least the FOG release on 7/24/2015, FOG installs and runs fine on Debian 8 (Jessie). Even the issue of the TFTP service not starting right after rebooting the server is resolved (by whom, I can’t say, but I know it is gone).

I have tested FOG and Debian 8 installations on existing FOG installations running on Debian 7, and on a fresh Debian 8 installation. If you are upgrading a Debian 7 installation, you will need to rerun your FOG installer (from a current GIT pull) after the Debian 7-8 upgrade is complete AND you have rebooted your server. If you have ANY software that is showing as “not upgraded” in apt-get, then your upgrade is not complete.

SVN will look a bit odd at first glance since its revision number no longer matches the current software revision that you will receive.

For example (numbers are made up for my time’s sake):
SVN shows rev 3899, installed FOG shows 4591. This is okay and normal now.

Given some unforeseen circumstance, I really doubt Secure Boot will ever be supported. UEFI support technically exists, it just requires customization for each network.

I was working on UEFI boot for a while before other projects came up. The result I came up against was that you either need to have a Linux DHCP or a Windows Server 2012R2 with DHCP present on the network. You could then configure the DHCP to serve different boot file names depending on detected architecture.

If nobody else does the documentation for the Windows Server configuration before I complete my current projects, I will put it into the Wiki.

And if you want to use the Debian family (Debian, Ubuntu, anything ending in “buntu”), then just get plain, vanilla, not messed with and works just fine Debian.

The best version of Ubuntu that I can recommend for any server installation is called Debian.

Windows 7 still thought SATA was a little hard. Before you upload the image, you should generalize the way Windows handles its storage drivers. HowTo:

How to change sata modes after windows installation
What that will do is force Windows to try multiple different types of storage driver on boot, instead of just the last one it used. The reason you are having this is that the VM likely used a form of IDE driver, and your Dell Optiplex 3020 defaults to AHCI mode on its SATA port.

If you really didn’t want to upload the image again, you could go to the BIOS and change the SATA mode to IDE or Compatibility. This should allow you to boot at least, but you will be running the drive controller much slower than it is capable of.

If you can reupload the image, then yes, I would do a fresh install on the 3020 and overwrite the VM image.

The mode you would want to switch to to make the current image boot is ATA by the way.

My two cents, I would suggest Debian or Fedora, and using Hyper-V instead of VirtualBox. Also ensure your drives on the server are fast, and/or your RAID array is properly set up for fast sequential reads. And if you have an AV on the host, make sure it is told to leave your VHD files alone.

Make sure you have your Surface on the latest firmware, or if not the August firmware, at least the July firmware. They’ve done some serious cleanup on the Surface EFI firmware that has made it a bit more network boot friendly.

Which type of imaging options did you select?

I should buy you a beer.

Hybrid drives are an interesting beast, especially when the hybrid is done via the motherboard. Usually if you want Windows to handle the hybrid solid state storage properly, you have to format it a special way, give it specific flags, and sometimes even label it a specific way, all before installing the driver that handles the hybrid feature. And what you need to do for each of those steps varies by manufacturer.

Now of course FOG will see the drives completely differently since it is running a Linux kernel in the PXE boot. There could be some issues with how FOG is seeing the drives, especially since hybrid drives on laptops typically use unique storage controllers. I would suggest trying the “All Disks, non resizeable” option. Is this image you are making meant to go onto a different system? If so, I would strongly suggest building the image on a more generic build, such as a virtual machine or regular desktop.

Lastly, Ubuntu changed a lot of things in 14.04 and beyond, and those changes are unlike any other Linux distro. As such, there are some things that are still buggy in FOG and Ubuntu 14.04. I would strongly suggest going with a different Linux distro such as Debian, RedHat, or Fedora. If you must stay on your current setup, then I suggest backing things up, then upgrading FOG to the SVN branch (see wiki for How To). There are a lot of improvements in the SVN branch that are being prepared for the next major release of FOG. You may still need to work around an issue or two running FOG on Ubuntu 14.04, but your overall experience should be better.

If upgrading or switching Distros are not options, then we’ll need you to try a few of the troubleshooting steps that Tom listed. There are workarounds for the bugs in Ubuntu 14.04, but we will need a bit more information from you to help point you towards the right fixes.

I’m fairly certain there was a bug with 8/8.1 in FOG 1.2.0. It is working fine in the latest SVN, but I suggest caution if you use FOG in production, since the SVN is the development branch. Bugs happen.

There are tools out there that can get Windows Passwords fairly easily out of XP through 7 machines. Use of those tools is legal so long as you are the owner of the systems you are using them on, so that part is on you. I suggest doing a Google for “Trinity Rescue Kit”.

I would ask that you try the suggested fixes in this thread, and report back on their results.

Press F8 and select “Disable Automatic Restart on System Failure”, then look for a BSOD.

Welcome to both the Fog community and the Corp IT community! Also going to throw in my usual suggestions to go with Hyper-V if you are already using a Windows Server environment, and to go with Debian instead of Ubuntu for server installs.

I would strongly suggest using the latest “trunk” version of FOG, as well as making sure you have your Surface’s firmware completely up to date, because earlier versions of the Surface firmware made using UEFI network boot nearly impossible.

So glad I set up a WSUS server on our domain. Its allowed me to dodge a number of bullets like this now. Its my common practice now to sit on all Microsoft patches for a week before rolling them out. Let the consumers and small businesses find the bugs. Enterprise aint got time for dat.

I suggest against installing Linux distros on Generation 2 Hyper-V. Newer Debian family distros technically support it, but I have seen some instability caused by the emulation of EFI hardware. Generation 1 works well still; its only drawbacks are a little more overhead and slightly slower boot times. But since Hyper-V and Linux have never fully integrated together, you shouldn’t see much difference in performance.

That being said, I’ve had FOG running on Gen1 Hyper-V for quite a long time here (even prior to 1.2.0), and its worked incredibly well. Granted I have dedicated a fair amount of resource on the host machine, and made sure that the other virtual instances running on the host are not disk-intensive.

Honestly, if you are running a most Microsoft server environment, I would strongly suggest using Hyper-V for your virtualization. It has been the easiest to manage throughout our domain, and most people’s Windows Server licensing already covers the use of at least two Windows Server instances on the host without having to pay for any additional licenses. And Linux system’s won’t use up any licensing at all, because Linux. And then there’s the added benefit that you can scale from a single virtual host to eventually having a clustered group of servers with fail-over and/or load balancing, using identical or mixed hardware. Really I do not understand why more Enterprise users running predominantly Windows environments do not use Hyper-V and instead go with less flexible and more expensive solutions.
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