Posts made by Neil Underwood

OK thanks for the info. Doesn’t sound like anything major.

I finally got a chance to control the PC in question and it appears that the FOG service that was installed was the legacy service from the previous image. In addition, it wasn’t even running (or at least the tray icon wasn’t present. I uninstalled and installed the new client service and the errors went away. I am only left with this now:

[Wed Jul 15 20:58:32.249637 2015] [:error] [pid 23877] [client 192.168.0.236:49190] PHP Warning:  mcrypt_decrypt(): Key of size 0 not supported by this algorithm. Only keys of sizes 16, 24 or 32 supported in /var/www/html/fog/lib/fog/FOGBase.class.php on line 241

Didn’t think to check there. Here you go:

 7/15/2015 7:29 PM FOG::SnapinClient Attempting to connect to fog server...
 7/15/2015 7:29 PM FOG::SnapinClient Module is active...
 7/15/2015 7:29 PM FOG::SnapinClient Snapin Found: 
 7/15/2015 7:29 PM FOG::SnapinClient     ID: 7
 7/15/2015 7:29 PM FOG::SnapinClient     RunWith: 
 7/15/2015 7:29 PM FOG::SnapinClient     RunWithArgs: 
 7/15/2015 7:29 PM FOG::SnapinClient     Name: 
 7/15/2015 7:29 PM FOG::SnapinClient     Created: 2015-06-09 13:44:44
 7/15/2015 7:29 PM FOG::SnapinClient     Args: 
 7/15/2015 7:29 PM FOG::SnapinClient     Reboot: No
 7/15/2015 7:29 PM FOG::SnapinClient Starting FOG Snapin Download
 7/15/2015 7:29 PM FOG::SnapinClient Failed to download file.
 7/15/2015 7:29 PM FOG::SnapinClient An exception occurred during a WebClient request.
 7/15/2015 7:29 PM FOG::SnapinClient    at System.Net.WebClient.DownloadFile(Uri address, String fileName)
   at FOG.SnapinClient.startWatching()

This is repeated many times. Spam filter won’t let me post it all though.

I just updated to 3791 and I’m getting a lot of errors in my logs. It’s mostly the same few errors just over and over. I came upon these because my web interface is now painfully slow with no transfer speed graph, so I was looking for an explanation.

The one’s I’m concerned with are:

[Wed Jul 15 12:46:19.720780 2015] [:error] [pid 2859] [client 192.168.18.178:50999] PHP Warning:  mysqli::query(): Couldn't fetch mysqli in /var/www/html/fog/lib/db/MySQL.class.php on line 59

[Wed Jul 15 12:38:11.719432 2015] [:error] [pid 4615] [client 192.168.36.151:56046] PHP Warning:  mysqli::poll(): No stream arrays were passed in /var/www/html/fog/lib/db/MySQL.class.php on line 67

[Wed Jul 15 12:39:13.171305 2015] [:error] [pid 13853] [client 192.168.10.147:63836] PHP Warning:  mysqli::mysqli(): (HY000/2002): Connection timed out in /var/www/html/fog/lib/db/MySQL.class.php on line 37
[Wed Jul 15 12:39:13.171392 2015] [:error] [pid 13853] [client 192.168.10.147:63836] PHP Warning:  mysqli::query() expects parameter 2 to be long, string given in /var/www/html/fog/lib/db/MySQL.class.php on line 59

BFD: /var/www/html/fog/service/ipxe/bzImage: Warning: Ignoring section flag IMAGE_SCN_MEM_NOT_PAGED in section .bss

It looks to me like there is some miscommunication going on with MySQL, but I’m too unfamiliar with it all to know where to start looking. As far as I know all my DB stuff is correct.

EDIT - I meant to post this to Fog Problems. Wasn’t paying attention.

Having a strange issue with one client PC in particular. It is flooding the Apache Access log with checkins to the tune of 3-4 times per second. Any idea why? I just deployed this thing recently to replace a PC that had been infected with Cryptowall.

Ah. I see. Thanks.

Could someone please explain what exactly the nodeclient plugin does? I installed it just to see what it was but I’m completely clueless on how to use it or configure it. Not sure what to enter in the configuration page fields, particularily for the port.

I’ve done a bit of searching and I can’t really seem to find any documentation other than the brief description about interoperability with legacy FOG service clients.

Just wanted to share that I went ahead and moved the server over to a physical unit temporarily. The old Dell server was starting to fail left and right. I went with CentOS 7 & FOG from git on a Dell Optiplex 3020 for the interim and wow it’s fast. Upload of a 40GB image was less than 10 minutes. Deploying the same image takes about 5 minutes. Backing up and importing the database was relatively painless. A few quirks to work out but they’re minor.

I just discovered that my RAID battery is failing. I’m definitely going to have to migrate this to our Hyper-V host.

I’m curious about the Fedora/CentOS recommendations. I’m definitely more comfortable with Debian/Ubuntu, but I’m not opposed to switching. I cut my teeth on Red-Hat. Are there noticeable benefits or is it just personal preference for you guys?

Thanks. I appreciate that. I was referring more to the conversion process from VDI to VHD format though. I intend to use the built-in “VBoxManage clonehd” feature to do the conversion, but it’s a 220GB file and it’s going to take a few hours to complete. Just want to make sure it succeeds on the first try.

I already have a Hyper-V host with several other VM’s on it that we just built as part of our Domain migration. If I can just do the conversion and fire up the new Hyper-V VM and pick right back up where I left off it would be great. I just worry about the differences in HW virtualization between the two and whether or not the Guest OS (Debian 7.8 in this case) will be tolerant enough.

Truthfully I would like to migrate away from Debian to Ubuntu. All my nodes are running Linux Mint 17.1 (Ubuntu 14.04) and I’d like to make them all uniform. I started with Debian because it’s what I’ve always used because of stability, but the Debian repositories are just too far behind the latest software releases and lately I’ve found myself having to jump through too many hoops to make things “just work” with it. That’s fine for fun at home, but not at work where I have actual deadlines.

So I moved the server over to a Gb switch and I’ve seen an increase in local deployments, but not by much. Transfer rate increased from ~1.5GB/min to ~2.5GB/min. I really think it’s just this weak old server with a Xeon 5130 2Ghz CPU that’s holding me back. Obviously got a little improvement being on the new switch, but that’s still way slower than it should be. I think I’m going to migrate this VM to one of our new Dell R420’s. I’m concerned about migrating from VBox to Hyper-V though. Any pitfalls I should know about?

Ugh. I just discovered the problem. It’s the switch. I thought this whole time that the switch was GB, because it says Gigabit. After poking around I see that only the uplink/downlink ports are GB. Everything else is 10/100. Kinda hard to to multicast through a 10/100 switch. I’ll have to request these switches be replaced.

So it looks like my VM is probably just fine. Just need a doggone switch. Maybe I’ll just interject a small 5 port GB switch at the uplink? We just bought about a dozen Netgear 5-port GB switches. I’ll try it out tomorrow and see.

That must be the issue then. I get ~1.5GB/min when imaging one PC through this switch. I only ever image 8 PC’s at a time. When I have 8 images deploying (unicast) from the FOG server through this Pro-Curve switch each successive deployment transfers exponentially slower, until I’m down to about 400-500MB/min. Just awful. It takes about an hour for 8 PC’s.

Originally I was pleased with that speed because my company’s previous method of imaging was doing it manually with a WinPE disc over the network, which took even longer. I see now though that this should be moving much quicker. Thanks for the feedback.

@Junkhacker This is the kind of speed I get when I deploy an image at one of my remote sites through a node. ~6m30s for a 40GB image.

@Wayne-Workman Nice. I upgraded my server from 1 core to 4 and increased RAM to 4096 dedicated.I did notice the WEB-UI was a little snappier. It didn’t seem to affect transfer speeds even the slightest bit though.

The PC’s I’m imaging have 2 Gigabit switches between them and the FOG server, and about 30 feet of cable, max. The main switch, however, is an HP Pro-Curve (shudder). I’m starting to think it may be the culprit rather than the VM. I have yet to investigate, simply due to the awful interface on that thing. I also think that switch is the reason that I can’t multicast. Anyone have first-hand experience with FOG & Pro-Curve switches?

Hmmmm. I’ve been wondering if I should attempt to upgrade to trunk for a while now. Ever since I encountered the hostnamechanger problem in 1.2.0 months ago.

Now that you mention it, I think my main server is only one core and like 2gb of ram. I didn’t think I would need much horsepower when I built it.

I believe my fastest node is a recent gen i3, so technically 4 cores. I really thought the disk speed and network latency would be the main bottlenecks.

I’m curious if anyone can confirm a degradation in transfer speed when deploying an image from a virtual machine vs a physical machine. I have one main FOG server and 2 remote “storage only” nodes. The main server is hosted on a Debian VM on a Server 2012 R2/Virtualbox host. I typically get ~1.5GB/min when deploying from this machine. When I deploy to a machine at a remote location and the image is being pushed from one of my standalone, physical storage nodes, transfer speeds are about 10 times that. It comes out to about 110-115MB/sec, which is about the max that most mechanical drives can take anyway.

Is it just coincidence? Or should I maybe start looking at my switches at the main site?

OK well that did it. I installed the location plugin and now everything is back up to speed. I guess it just needed a little direction and I just got lucky on that first image I deployed to test the remote storage node. Thanks again.

No, I’m not using the location plugin. Should I be? I had the impression that it was kind of abandoned/for older versions of FOG so I never actually looked into it.

OK so I’m left with a lingering issue now. I’m trying to deploy an image to make sure everything is working, but the image is only being pushed out from one of the remote nodes to a local machine over the MPLS, giving me a horrible transfer rate of ~ 80MB/min. Why would it not deploy the image from the local server? I’ve witnessed this system deploy an image in under 6.5 minutes. What logs should I be checking to figure this out?

I got it working! I’m really uncertain exactly what it was that finally did it though

Basically I made the password for user ‘fog’ the same on all 3 machines. I then made sure this user/pass combo was the same for the mysql ‘fog’ user, as well as the tftp & ftp storage user/pass. So in short everything has the same login credentials across the board.

I also created specific grants for each remote user, e.g.

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'fog'@'192.168.xxx.200' IDENTIFIED BY 'xxxxxxxx' WITH GRANT OPTION;

for each remote ip address.

Thanks to everyone for your assistance. Special thanks to Tom for taking the time to have a private chat session with me to help me get this figured out. You guys are awesome.

PS - Not sure how to mark solved on this forum…