Hi,

We have three FOG servers that are not geographically co-located and are on networks that have no routing between them but service the same population of laptops.

We would love there to exist a mechanism where we could point all the servers at a file storage server on the Internet, such as an FTP server or a file synchronization service like Google Drive or Dropbox. We would like the following to occur:

• Each server would maintain a file on the remote file storage with a journal of database changes.
• All the machines would read these journals and use them to keep their databases in step (an extra database field could be added to show which server in the constellation was the last to image a given laptop.)
• Images should have a flag to indicate whether they should be common across the servers. If this flag is TRUE then the server that created that image should upload it to the shared file server and it should then be picked up and added to the other servers in the constellation to enable seamless reimaging if a laptop is moved from one region to another.

Of these capabilities, the database synchronization is far more important to us. We can shift the image folders ourselves.

Thank you,
Paul.

Hi,

We have just encountered the following issue on v1.1.1:

A user PXE booted a new machine and attempted a full registration, inventory and image. The machine was named “LNG6” but then he fumbled the keyboard and accidentally entered the character ‘/’ as the image ID. The PXE environment didn’t check that this was a real image number or even that it was a valid numeric input. It completed the inventory and attempted a reboot.

The reboot failed with the error “[url]http://192.148.4.1/fog/service/ipxe/boot.php[/url] Input/output error ([url]http://ipxe.org/1d0c6139[/url])” From this point on, it was not possible to net boot that machine to get the menu to delete it. After several failed attempts, the user gave up, took a fresh machine and called that LNG6. The FOG server allowed him to do this even though a machine of this name already existed.

The user visited the FOG management website and found two entries for LNG6 in the database.

[COLOR=#1f497d][FONT=Calibri]The LNG server listed the LNG6 in the hosts lists with the correct MAC address, however it could not be edited or deleted (editing produced an empty host edit page and trying to delete it produced a blank web page with just the URL, containing id=0, in the address bar). It was noticed that “ID=0” was in all URLs to do with this machine where the user thought it should have been ID=211 (machines imaged before and after this was ID 210 and 212). User tried a number of things including typing a URL to specify ID=211, however this did not work. Subsequently, it was found to be possible to change the machine name to “BROKEN” by manually entering the MAC address and new name in the edit page.[/FONT][/COLOR] At this point, the other LNG6 became the only one and appears to be fine.

[COLOR=#1f497d][FONT=Calibri]The MySQL database was accessed directly from the server command line and a SELECT query for the machine produced the following, indicating the problem entry really did have an ID of 0:[/FONT][/COLOR]

[QUOTE]mysql> select * from hosts where hostmac=‘8c:c1:21:a4:6e:b6’;
±-------±---------±---------±-------±----------±-------------±--------------------±--------------------±-------------±------------------±----------±-------------±---------±-----------±-----------±-----------------±---------------±-----------±-----------+
| hostID | hostName | hostDesc | hostIP | hostImage | hostBuilding | hostCreateDate | hostLastDeploy | hostCreateBy | hostMAC | hostUseAD | hostADDomain | hostADOU | hostADUser | hostADPass | hostPrinterLevel | hostKernelArgs | hostKernel | hostDevice |
±-------±---------±---------±-------±----------±-------------±--------------------±--------------------±-------------±------------------±----------±-------------±---------±-----------±-----------±-----------------±---------------±-----------±-----------+
| 0 | BROKEN | | | 0 | 0 | 2014-10-25 11:56:36 | 0000-00-00 00:00:00 | FOGREG | 8c:c1:21:a4:6e:b6 | | | | | | | | | |
±-------±---------±---------±-------±----------±-------------±--------------------±--------------------±-------------±------------------±----------±-------------±---------±-----------±-----------±-----------------±---------------±-----------±-----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
[/QUOTE]

To make it possible to image the machine, it had to be forcibly deleted from the database:

[QUOTE]mysql> delete from hosts where hostmac=‘8c:c1:21:a4:6e:b6’;[/QUOTE]

Many thanks for looking,
Paul.

For some reason, I can’t edit the above post…

Just wanted to add that it appears that the installer may not complete successfully unless all the runtime prerequisites are already installed.

I fixed it

Note: I’d previously done an [B][I]apt-get install udpcast[/I][/B] to fix a complaint while debugging about the program udp-sender being missing. Don’t know if I should have done this or not because I thought UDPCast was installed by the FOG installer.

I put a full screen terminal on the server, ran [B][I]tail -f /var/log/apache2/error.log[/I][/B] so I could see the errors in real time. Almost hidden in the deluge of index and undefined variable errors, I found a couple of errors.[B][I] [/I][/B]

[B][I]PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function json_encode()[/I][/B]
[INDENT=1]A bit of Googling revealed the same error in a different program being caused by the package php5-json not being installed. This was fixed by the command [B][I]apt-get install php5-json[/I][/B][/INDENT]
[INDENT=1]This fixed a number of performance issues including sluggish responses and the version number checker on the login screen being broken.[/INDENT]

[B][I]sh: 1: /opt/fog/utils/md5pass: not found[/I][/B].
[INDENT=1]I looked with the file manager and /opt/fog/utils/md5pass was indeed missing. In fact the whole /opt/fog/utils folder wasn’t there. Since it appeared the installer hadn’t correctly done its job, I re-ran [B][I]installfog.sh[/I][/B] and the contents of /opt/fog appeared correctly.[/INDENT]
[INDENT=1] [/INDENT]
I’ve still got various complaints in the Apache error log about undefined variables and indices but FOG now seems to work.

Bests,
Paul.

Hi,

I’m just working on a proof-of-concept install of a FOG server for work and I’m having some issues.

The first problem is I can’t save the master password in the PXE menu screen. I get an error saying the encrypted password is null. The most common explanation I’ve seen for this is the md5 bindings being missing. I’ve checked and libcrypt-passwdmd5-perl is installed.

I’m not sure if part of the problem is that I’m running 64-bit Ubuntu 13.10 but there doesn’t seem to be a 32-bit version of the passwdmd5-perl package. To make the server take image uploads I had to remove the & references from &$tmp in tasks.confirm.include.php so I appear to be running a newer version of PERL than the one FOG was written against.

I would be grateful of any suggestions you might have.

Thank you,
Paul.

Hi,

As has been said above, Ubuntu is Debian with newer versions of some stuff, a different install program and a pretty desktop.

I’ve had what you experienced happen on one of my machines when I installed a different desktop. I installed something that hadn’t been Ubuntu-customised and that caused the boot screen to revert to the original one it had before Ubuntu applied their look. Is it the boot screen that has changed (the one that shows up when you turn the machine on) or the login screen (the one you type your password into)?

There’s almost certainly nothing to worry about. Nobody has compromised your box.