Topics created by p4cm4n

the below entry, opening max connections for sql - was indeed a fix.
default is 151, and i now have been a solid 200 connections for a week with no issues.

in debian 11, i did the following :

sudo su -
mysql -D fog
SET GLOBAL max_connections = 512;

To make this a permanent solution, refer to the link in the previous post.

@p4cm4n There is a master imaging script that gets called when FOS Linux starts up its called simply fog https://github.com/FOGProject/fos/blob/fda59eca648af1a38ed57c94f65558221e77534f/Buildroot/board/FOG/FOS/rootfs_overlay/bin/fog#L1

At the beginning of that script on line 4 I added a long time ago the code for usb booting, in that the target computer would call back to the FOG server to get the kernel parameters. Normally iPXE would load the kernel parameters when fog imaging was requested. But with USB booting into FOS Linux there are no kernel parameters per se. So this code was added to the beginning of the master bash script.

if [[ $boottype == usb && ! -z $web ]]; then sysuuid=$(dmidecode -s system-uuid) sysuuid=${sysuuid,,} mac=$(getMACAddresses) curl -Lks -o /tmp/hinfo.txt --data "sysuuid=${sysuuid}&mac=$mac" "${web}service/hostinfo.php" -A '' [[ -f /tmp/hinfo.txt ]] && . /tmp/hinfo.txt fi

So specifically the curl calls back to the fog server to run a php file that loads the kernel parameters into /tmp/hinfo.txt then we stat or run that hinfo.txt file to load the kernel parameters into the bash variables. That was the trick to “rebooting” without actually restarting FOS Linux or the computer. Then after the variables were loaded I think I called fog.download directly.

If you look down that fog script a bit you will see the variables $mode and $type. After you load the kernel parameters you may need to unset $mode and set $type to “down” then call fog.download. That is what the script is checking for to know what fog module to call on each boot.

The trick is to call fog.download and not let the fog.man.reg exit, because when it does control will be returned to the main fog script and the target system will reboot.

@p4cm4n The short answer is that its possible. What you will need to do is create a customized version of the fog.man.reg file. ref: https://github.com/FOGProject/fos/blob/master/Buildroot/board/FOG/FOS/rootfs_overlay/bin/fog.man.reg

If you know programming (helpful to understand process flow) but not maybe php you can make adjustments to this file bypassing the prompts and filling in the static details.

Then you can use a postinit script to replace the FOG issued fog.man.reg with your custom coding.

https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/14278/creating-custom-hostname-default-for-fog-man-reg

The last bit I need to think about a bit. I know if the FOG server passes a parameter to FOS linux after FOG does it thing (registration, imaging, etc) it will shutdown instead of reboot. I think the parameter is shutdown=1 I think… you can also set that in your custom fog.man.reg and have FOG shutdown after taking inventory. I know you can set it at a global level, but you might only want to shutdown after registration but not imaging.

Now I’ve worked on a few big imaging projects. I have used a custom fog.man.reg file to speed up registration. I’ve also made use of barcodes. For one project the computer name was a composite of the country, city LUN code, and then the dell serial number. In one case I created a barcode with the country and lun code (i.e. USNYC) on a bit of paper. Our workflow would be then when entering the name we would scan the paper then scan the dell asset tag on the computer and finally press enter on the keyboard, From there all of the rest of the FOG required fields were defaulted.

Another project we didn’t register the computers with FOG because FOG would not manage them once imaged. In this workflow we used the fog ipxe menu Deploy Image. We picked the image, the image would deploy and then using a post install script the name of the computer was calculated. The country and city lun codes were calculated based on the client’s IP address and then we use dmidecode to read the dell asset tag. So once we picked deploy and the image to deploy we did not touch the computer until it was ready to move to the user’s desk.

@p4cm4n You can do that, there is a tutorial (for uefi) to create a boot drive the easy way. This will load iPXE from a usb stick and then boot into FOG. https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/6350/usb-boot-uefi-client-into-fog-menu-easy-way

For those that can’t use iPXE I have FOS Linux on a usb stick too. You lose about 30% of the functionality of FOG but you can image no problem with it. https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/7727/building-usb-booting-fos-image

First of all its not the best place to put the recovery partition at the beginning of the disk. The MS recommends the efi partition be on disk 1 partition 1. It has been that way for years. Also I would question the logic of needing a recovery partition at all. With FOG its much faster to rebuilt the system then to try to recover it. I understand (as someone recently pointed out) that if the computer is at a remote location to the FOG server then the only option is to try to recover it. On my campus I don’t use/create the recovery partition at all. I do use MDT to build the golden image, with MDT I can chose how to create the disk layout for both bios and uefi systems. If I had a choice I would place the recovery partition before the 😄 drive partition, that would make the biggest resizable partition last on the disk where it can be easily resized.

@p4cm4n This sounds like an interesting project. I hope that you deleted the posts not by intention!

While I have not used wireguard myself yet it seems to be a nice tool and should allow you to setup things as you intend to. Might need some more considerations on where to place the VPN gateways in each network to get the routing right and not make it too complex.

The slowest link between any one route of them will be 20 Mbps.

A 20 GB image would take two and a half hours if you look at the plain numbers. I am sure it will take longer as you can’t have full speed all the time. It would even be wise to throttle replication speed to not lock up internet access for the offices. But if you don’t change images on a daily basis I reckon this is a reasonable setup.

I would suggest you set Image Manager to “Partcline Gzip Split 200 MB” for the images. This way replication can pick up again if a connection break terminates the replication of an image half way.

I’d like to be able to login to MAIN, and find the host sitting at Client C

For this setup you install FOG in master mode and the main site and as storage nodes at site A, B, C, … but you need to know that capturing an image at a remote site will push this through your VPN tunnel to the master node directly! There is no way to capture “local images to a storage node only”.

@p4cm4n Good to hear it’s not caused by the fog-client. Keeping my fingers crossed that you find what broke the install on 1909 soon! Please let us know what you find.

@george1421 you are a wizard.

thats fixed!

now onto my next thing. heres to hoping that once i can grab a HDD big enough for my images that can support these ginormously underused HDD’s in these labs…that all is good 🙂

@Sebastian-Roth I can do that. It is kind of the same issue. In RAID mode the registration option loads but it just never finds a hard drive. It errors out with the same error OP posted here (can’t find drives). I would assume because the Intel RAID controller hides the actual drives.

@p4cm4n In the case of storage nodes, the fog server that hosts the database has to be updated with the remote node’s new IP address. So to answer your question, No. Though since the database credentials are present on the storage node, some alterations to the scripts could make this possible.

@p4cm4n We have seen issues with this lately and I am wondering if there is a bug pending. But on the other hand I cannot replicate this and I have done a couple of storage node installs lately. Please let us know if you have an idea on how this happened. Marking as solved for now.

@p4cm4n said in install fails - adding repository... failed:

when it gets to adding distro it fails.

I guess you meant “adding repository” here, right?

For Mint and Ubuntu we add ondrej repos (commands add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php and add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/apache2).

Debian is different, here we only add a repo for Debian 7 which shouldn’t be used anymore anyway.

In the same directory where you have the FOG installer script there is a subdirectory called “error_logs”. There you find log files with specific error messages. Please take a look and post here if you can’t figure it out on your own.

@wayne-workman that was basically it. worked extraordinarily well with the one. my initial setup and testing, i didn’t have control over the dhcp server so i had to do it with two. it worked at that site, but there were flaws. once deploying it, a mix of hardware issues, network issues, and ultimately permissions on things caused problems.
thanks for all you guys do though.

@p4cm4n You could probably use a snapin-pack to deliver the Chrome MSI as well as a powershell script. The powershell script could do a small loop with a maximum of say three iterations. Each time, it can try to install Chrome and then check if it’s installed. If the correct version is installed, exit the loop.

@p4cm4n OK now that you have the password parts worked out, you should be able to go into FOG Settings->FOG Kernel and from there you can downgrade to the 4.15.2 kernels, just download both bzImage and bzImage32 for the PC platform. From there it will download the kernels. You can check by going on the FOG server console to

cd /var/www/html/fog/service/ipxe file bzImage

That should print out version 4.15.2. If that is the case you are golden. FWIW, you CAN do this while you are imaging as long as you don’t currently have a system pxe booting.

@p4cm4n Glad you figured out what the issue was and a way to resolve the problem. Glad to help program this for you, among others. I know how useful it is and how it has impacted jobs.

Now if only I could find a job that requires FOG as a part of it, I think I’d be a shoe in lol.

@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!

@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.