sorry, but it just popped up -
the issue is with copy profile. who knows why - but i have had the same issue. i’ve just defaulted to NOT using copy profile true, and some people have been using some ForensIT products like defprof to combat the issue…
i second that microsoft doesn’t care about us who use sysprep, and its limited lifespan remaining…if it did, sysprep would be much more feature robust.
okay i’m running.
not sure the kernel thing worked, i read i can do debug and uname -a and see, but not worried about it, that it takes 3-5 min for gpt tables…since i can image 
so heres what i did - i originally followed your tutorial, but the .fogsettings password was encrypted. copying it and pasting in encrypted state caused the client to be imaged to fail at TFTP loading. so heres what i did.
i went into .fogsettings and changed the password to password. i then went into the tutorial places and changed accordingly, lastly running the installer. then, the client machine is imaging as i type.
unsure if running the installer fixed it, or if the password stuff fixed it. honestly considering i’d done so many before that i find it difficult to believe it was password related at this point, but who knows. when i changed password before, i changed it in tftp and storage but never run the installer. i initially changed it because i got that ftp error on trying to create an image.
thanks man!
only a couple hundred to go lol
@george1421
Its interesting you mention the fog user account - for some reason on roughly half of the installs of fog I did to mess with, something would happen to permissions on storage, or files and I learned to just do a sudo passwd fog and set to password.
the database wouldn’t fail typically - only when that level of high saturation would occur. its almost as if certain services would hiccup or hang. a reboot would usually cure the issue.
First off, THANKS! I kept wondering about why it took so long to do that. Thought cuz the initial machine I was using had been used as a loaner and kept having new OS’s put on a lot. Thought the partition table was screwed up.
Okay a little more topography info.
I have a linux mint 18.3 with two nics. one on the internet enabled school network for non-booting purposes. It allows for snapins, client management, etc.
The other nic is for booting (broadcom, not sure the model) connected to 1gigabit netgear unmanaged switch.
For whatever reason, i keep having network issues. whether its the building i’m in and the network hardware in place, or just my crappy ‘sitting around for 3 years doing nothing so might as well put linux on it’ hardware…the internet nic drops out after certain periods and requires me to add routing and gateway information again. not sure why.
These 7 machines have the same baseline firmware, because as a whole, most of these machines haven’t been modified since their initial deployment. So I’m not sure if they’re booting to uefi (don’t think they are) I know the PXE booting that I’m selecting is of the legacy boot options. I generally use legacy, not uefi boot mode. The win10 image is efi though.
I will attempt to do best video I can, and see what comes up. I created a VM environment to test with at home right now and see if its also server related or machine related.
I’ll also test the settings from PHP and report back, as well as kernel downgrade.
So i can’t give you an EXACT wording, but after the blue imaging screen, after the setting of the partition labels and types and uuids and such, it has a line something like updating database…Failed!. The images still work, however the tasks menu still doesn’t show it having been entirely completed (usually its stuck at a progress bar of whenever it lost connectivity.) This is probably related to the network being saturated though. I will keep the imaging at 6 or under for the time being, and set the storage limit to 4…time taken isn’t necessarily an issue as they’re completing in 2:04 for a 500GB (~15GB used) partition.
I will be back at that site on Tuesday here. Honestly, if an issue arises I may just reinstall or attempt timeshift. I was able to successfully image that one of those same machines from a fog VM here just now.
Unicast, nothing was unique about these 7 however. I thought there was a hiccup on the server - here was my process:
Deploy base win10 1803 image, with fog connecting to fog-srv through wifi. Setupcomplete added a wifi profile, reenabled fog, and rebooted. Rename and join domain & reboot. Deploy of 10 or so snapins (chrome, firefox, java, adobe reader, 7zip, few more wifi profiles, centrastage agent, testing browsers, vlc) reboot.
I had a weird machine in the batch before these 7 that was stuck at renaming - kept getting in a reboot loop. best thing I could find in the log was something about failure to authenticate after it got the cert…but kept trying to figure that one out, then went back to the 7 in question.
They’re all dell latitude 3340 or something similar. I’ve got about 200 of them. Successfully did about 60 before these 7. They’re all UEFI but booting to legacy network, with a UEFI image.
Honestly can’t see much when I select deploy image from the menu because its so fast. I usually don’t boot to menu and select that, I create the task from the webserver and just boot to PXE, then slide them back in their carts watching the LED’s to see when they finish (tasked with shutdown)
I installed everything this past weekend so 1.5.4 and I can’t tell you the kernel right now…its built on linux mint 18.3 newest kernel for it 4.13 or so because 4.15 breaks my raid drivers.
I keep having an issue occasionally where if I boot ~10, the first 6 (max) will boot into the blue imaging screen. 2 or so more will get to waiting in line, 2 more will get stuck at loading boot file, then the ones that image all finish imaging and get to updating database and fail…I thought the issue was with a crappy netgear switch I was using, started smaller deployment groups and that seemed to work but almost right before this batch I had that issue - had to restart then too. Was successful in imaging 7 or 8 more though.
Hi,
So as I was fogging a classroom yesterday, I imaged about 7 or so at a time. When I got to my last 7, they wouldn’t pull an image.
It seems they will boot to fog on pxe, bring up the pxe menu, tell me they’re registered (Registered as specific hostname!) and even though they’re set to pull the image, they won’t. I have the bios/uefi exit type to the wrong one so it won’t boot to HDD and it will auto go to a black boot screen with nothing but a flashing cursor. If I select deploy image, the screen goes black for half a second, then back to the menu again.
In tasks, these 7 show they are waiting to deploy - but they aren’t populating the storage section in active tasks (as the other 23 did - but those 23 finished fine.)
I restarted the server, checked permissions the storage folder (/images mounted from a RAID10, but everything checks out and its mounted correctly and all).
TIA!
Scott
@wayne-workman thanks man but turns out it was due to my crappy netgear switches. actually used a cisco enterprise switch and all the clients connected on meraki AP’s, didn’t do all at once but it did send out office 13 (800mb) and a slimmed down version of smart (1.2) to ~10 at once at any one time.
worked well.
i can’t tell you how awesome this software is - i just got a new job, they gave me this new client to us with 350 machines, 2 weeks to reimage them all and i have a baby due in that 2 week period.
started yesterday, only 320 more go to lol.
Thanks again!
@victorkrazan6267 oooh nice something I can help with.
So I tried exactly what you are trying times 1000, and the very last thing I could get to work was adobe. In fact, I saved the command to finally install it as a txt file called F**ingfinallyabletoinstalladobe.txt lol.
What worked for me in the end was using JUST the installer exe by itself but with a command switch. It basically extracts to a path, uses a switch called
(Exe path) -sfx_o”c:(path to extract)” /sALL msi EULA_ACCEPT=YES
this worked for me. I found it off an adobe forum titled “how to download reader dc 2017.009.20044 msi”
So I had some issues early on but fixed them. Now I’m having issues with two things, but one is probably unrelated.
I have terrible inconsistencies with the installer firstly, but once I finally get it installed…
Now after setting up an image, my hosts, my snapins…one is 1.8GB, the others are the typical chrome and such so ~100 mb…
I deploy image to 20 computers with snapins. Once several get to the 1.8gb one, then the server hiccups and the only fix so far is to reboot the server. The snapins folder is on my boot drive not my raid array with my images…maybe I can move it to that?
Is there a place I can look to see why this is happening?
Fog 1.5.4 on Linux mint 18.3 on a msi mobo, penguin g processor, 4gb, integrated nic on my regular network and a broadcom for dhcp network all connected at the moment to crappy netgear switches
Drive array is 6x1tb in raid 10 for images, 320gb hdd OS drive
@george1421 @Wayne-Workman
thanks guys, originally the idea was more so that i could have a stable image with an IP for the fog server that could interface with a machine deployed now, to a server used in the future. But yes, ultimately I’m trying for a seperate box/vm to run fog for those reasons at each site. I’m just coming into a situation though and there is already excessive amounts of dedicated boxes that run pseudo important tasks, but maybe consolidating those will give me some hardware to run fog on anyways. more of a project is all.
thanks though!
has anyone used fog from an external internet standpoint? IE Fog being an outside facing machine?
I was thinking about using it to deploy to client sites, and also standalone clients -
so for example i have a satellite office without VPN that the fog client will connect to my external IP address, with the appropriate port mappings so that i can push snapins for example to machines scattered in different places.
does anyone know what ports I’d need to do this? i saw the list in the wiki, am i correct in all of those? and if so, is there any way to specify different ports to the client?
@p4cm4n also, tried cmd and batch from sfx archives, specifically 7zip sfx maker which threw an error trying to run on my own machine and winrar sfx maker. Rar is crappier compression but oh well. One of those worked can’t remember which…but things like wifi configs using it didnt.
ALrighty.
Thanks first of all, I’ve seen the couple admins and devs and this software is fantastic. I just started at a place that gets gobs of machines at once - 53 hit my desk this week, and I’d rather not touch them all (save for unboxing, changing bios boot options, ya know)
To first start testing fog I put it on a esxi vm on a closed network. Took a while to get it working correctly off one nic while the other was still functional (couldn’t modify dhcp server, still wanted fog snapins and such on main lan) and after a weekend of testing got that setup. Skipping past sysprep issues of course, which some people on here helped with without even knowing it, now I have issues with snapins.
So my base image is win 10 1803, audit mode and copied over a .bat that runs xcopy from a server. That will house a local ‘tech package’ of some ninites, centrastage clients, and allow a sysadmin to change hostname, run wsus offline etc. Because it ills fresh after every install, i can modify that folder structure to pass commands to the next file that is called to run after sysprep - but I’d rather not. Originally it ran a chocolatey string of adobe,chrome,vlc type installs and when you have 53 machines query an http server well…lol so I started on snapins.
The base list of snapins are simple mostly but have been giving me headaches. I’ve seen people throw a >apologize.txt file as output but that never seems to work. I get various ‘returns’ all from things i assume are because it runs as system. For example - easy one…vlc install. The tag is /S. Returns 0 or 1, but I get nothing. THats an .exe file, so I try other things…msiexec /i seems to work for the most part if it’s only a single install - but sometimes I try to run batch for things (we have a lot of activpanels, from a company called Promethean…think smartboards) so I’ll run a batch to install the 4-5 addons for that - nothing. Try seperately with /qn, nothing. Gave up.
Cmd/batch is a very powerful tool in my repertoire so I use it as much as I can. A lot don’t work though. A simple
Pushd \10.10.10.10\postdeploy
Wmic/append:servicetag.txt bios get serialnumber
Echo %computername%>>servicetag.txt
Popd
Should work, as it does easily when ran as any user on any machine…however fails when ran. The list goes on.
I can attach anything you’d like, change commands give outputs of commands (if we can figure out the >appinstall.txt) and everything…that’s where I’m at so far though. I will ask more as time goes on. This is long enough as is.
Thanks in advance!