Thanks Tom!
I’m aware of the naming conventions, etc., and I usually manage the kernels manually from the terminal, but thanks for clarifying.

Do not worry about an x64 init.gz, unless you have extra time, haha! As you suggest, I don’t really need to use it under FOG 0.32, I just thought that it could be an interesting test. The 3.14.0 x86 Tom Elliott kernel has been great on a stock FOG 0.32 installation, and I will definitely try 3.14.1 today or tomorrow!

Thanks again for your work and dedication to this project!

Thanks for the reply, you guys are the best. As always, your work is very, very appreciated.

I am a little bit pressed for time, but I will certainly get back to this soon, and report on how it goes. I’m still chugging along with 11.10 for now but really want to move to 12.04 as it is LTS.

Regarding updates, is the new 3.14.0 x64 Tom Elliott kernel supported in Fog 0.32 x64? If so, where is the init.gz for that kernel? I’m positive that I cannot load the 3.14.0 x64 kernel because I am using the stock init.gz from a FOG 0.32 x64 installation. Maybe this setup is not supported and I have to use FOG 0.33b to use the x64 kernel?

I’ve have however had good success with the 3.14.0 Tom Elliott x86 kernel using the stock init.gz from a FOG 0.32 x64 installation.

Thank you,
D.L.

Hello,
Thanks for the guide. I’ve been using FOG for several years now and I’ve stayed on Ubuntu 11.10 with no problems. However, 11.10 is no longer supported and is getting pretty “long in the tooth”, so I’ve decided to attempt a FOG installation on Ubuntu 13.10. Of course, until I have it working, I do not want to take my 11.10 installation offline, so everything is being done in a test environment.

But I have run into an issue, with Ubuntu 13.10. When I type this command:

[U]sudo –c ‘echo “greeter-show-manual-login=true” >> /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf’[/U]

I get a “Permission denied” error…

I thought that it could be a directory permissions problem so I ran:

sudo chmod -R 777 /etc/lightdm

After modifying the permissions and re-running the command from the guide, it simply says:

sudo -c: command not found

I must be missing something obvious, but any help with this would be greatly appreciated as I was hoping to use some kind of guide/instructions to get FOG .32/.33b up and running on a Ubuntu 13.10 system.

Thanks for reading!

Can this Fusion Inventory Agent join AD, with the same ease of use, etc? I know that is a loaded question, but I could not find an easy answer on Google.

I do not mean to keep beating a living horse here, but I really think that some kind of AD integration is crucial to the system, overall. I understand that many folks do not use AD, or even Windows, but one of the main reasons I have stuck with this platform (Windows, AD, FOG) is the integrated “auto-naming”, “auto-joining” capabilities - I know that there are many, many alternatives to this system, but I have never seen one in action that works so damn well, and is so user (and entry-level tech) friendly! I just have a hard time contemplating switching to another way of doing this that is LESS good and MORE complicated, like so many of the alternatives out there…

Also, I totally agree about the [I]“Multi-Site improvements and site replication built in with no mods” - [/I]I forgot to mention that in my previous post, and that would just be great!

Thank you for reading,
D.L.

[SIZE=3]This worked like a charm, I really appreciate your help on this one!![/SIZE]

[SIZE=3]What might also be cool is possibly to introduce other optional variables to the auto-population scheme. I am really starting to use the auto-population a lot these days, and the “System Serial” I think would be quite a useful option. For some manufacturers this is an absurdly long string (why?) but in the case of Dell’s, HP’s, etc. it would be great! I honestly wish that they would all use a short, easily readable serial/tag like Dell, but for some reason they don’t…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=3]In my case we often name machines STE-ROM-*******[/SIZE]
[SIZE=3]where ******* would be the Dell, HP serial/tag.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=3]Thank you again,[/SIZE]
[SIZE=3]D.L.[/SIZE]

Thank you so much for this, I cannot wait to try it out! I have to do some other less fun stuff this afternoon, but if there is not time to get to it, then I will do so tomorrow.

[I]“looking to have the hostname’s autopopulate as their MAC address right? Is the reason you’re wanting this particular functionality simply so that the hosts obtain a specific OS and Image ID? That’s really the only reason I could think of for this particular request.”[/I]

[I]- [/I]This is absolutely correct, but also it auto-starts the imaging process for newly “quick registered” hosts which makes it even simpler, faster, (and you don’t have to touch the web UI) especially if I am showing this process to another person. If I have already done the setup, all they have to do is set the boot order, wait for the PXE boot menu and select “Quick Host Registration and Inventory”, nothing more, which is dead simple and fast. This gets “new in box” machines out really quickly without an admin having to set OS ID, Image ID, and press Deploy, etc. - I would like to have a better naming scheme in the future (and it seems that the code is already in place for that!) but for now I am just going to go with the MAC address as the hostname.

Thank you again Tom, I really appreciate it. And as a big FOG fan, for me, this is a really great and useful mod. I will let you know how it goes soon,

D.L.

Actually, I did not try this because I really want to use autopop, but turning it off did restore the MAC address naming scheme! Thank you for the suggestion!

So, is it not possible to autopop with the MAC address and auto-image, etc? I would much rather use the MAC address than another naming convention (right now), but it seems like this is not possible if you want it to auto-image, which currently is more important. With autopop on, of course, I can set the all the variables and get it imaging as quickly as possible, but is there no wildcard, variable, etc. that you can put in the FOG_QUICKREG_SYS_NAME to get it to still use the MAC address during this process?

Thank you for your help, it is much appreciated!

Thanks for the reply!

I will have a look tomorrow, but I would think that it would be the same in config.php as in the web UI.

Besides auto pop being 1, yours are factory default settings, but the really strange thing is how with these settings it does make the MAC address (with no colons) the hostname, seemingly ignoring the PC-* convention. I’ve tried putting it back to these except for the Img ID and OS ID, setting those to Image 3, OS ID 5 for Windows 7 and it does not restore the MAC address convention.

I will try using -1 for the IMG and OS ID but it would be strange if those affected the naming convention of the hosts. It seems that once you touch these settings, you are from then on stuck with whatever naming convention you chose, with * as an optional sys_number variable, which is very strange.

I guess that I could re-install, but you would think that there would be a way out of this trap. If you have time, energy, and bravery (or a better test environment than me) try playing with these settings and you will see that it ditches the MAC address naming convention when you do. It is very strange to me that it ignores its own settings at first, using MAC address instead of sys_name, sys_number, then once you touch these settings you can’t get it back to MAC address naming convention.

Thank you for reading and for any help / advice!

From “Other Information”, “FOG Settings” - in the web UI.

Thanks!

Hello,
I have a small issue where I was playing around with the FOG quick registration settings, and now something is wrong and/or I cannot get it back to its default behavior where it uses the MAC address (with no colons) as the hostname.

Before today, I have never really used the FOG_QUICKREG_AUTOPOP but I have great reason to do so now, so any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

On a fresh FOG server install I had these settings:
FOG_QUICKREG_AUTOPOP 1
FOG_QUICKREG_IMG_ID 1
FOG_QUICKREG_OS_ID 1
FOG_QUICKREG_SYS_NAME *
FOG_QUICKREG_SYS_NUMBER 1

With these settings, I thought that it would auto-populate and auto-name with the machine’s MAC address as its hostname and the FOG_QUICKREG_SYS_NUMBER would advance, but I cannot get that to happen again. I know that the key is in the FOG_QUICKREG_SYS_NAME, but how do I make that the MAC address again?

Now, the system names the machine 1, 2, 3, 4, according to the FOG_QUICKREG_SYS_NUMBER, or it actually names it *.

I have tried 0 (off), 1 (on) and * and all possible combinations in both FOG_QUICKREG_SYS_NAME and FOG_QUICKREG_SYS_NUMBER and I just cannot get it to use the MAC address as the name anymore (without colons) like it did upon a fresh install (default behavior). I guess that I do not have to touch FOG_QUICKREG_SYS_NUMBER, which is now up to the “next number in the sequence” - since I have only 9 total machines registered in this database, FOG_QUICKREG_SYS_NUMBER is now 10, and advancing correctly.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated, because I really wanted to use the MAC address as the hostname (minus the colons) - I should have left it alone but I would rather not re-install, if possible.

Thank you for any help,
D.L.

FOG is arguably the best application in the known world and I am deeply interested in its future. The creators and developers of this amazing piece of software are truly living geniuses, gods among men, and I am eternally grateful for their work.

Since the only constant is change, I would like to just throw a few things out there as a FOG user…

I have had great success with the FOG service and I actually really like that integration; that being said I know that it is hard to develop and maintain. I have never really used:

Auto Log Out
Directory Cleaner
Display Manager
Green FOG
User Tracker
User Cleanup

But please, oh please keep the Hostname Changer and Host Register with the AD integration (they have continued to work well for me in Windows 7, x86 and x64 - Windows 8 worries me regarding this, but hey, it is NT 6.2, right?) I could live without the FOG tray, but the FOG service with those two features along with Task Reboot and Snap-ins would be so, so nice to still have because it makes FOG a complete imaging, auto-naming, program-deploying solution and I have never, ever seen any other application that does this so elegantly and so well - not by a long shot. I also really like the ability to load all those tests from the web UI. I’ve had varying degrees of success with most, but consider memtest almost essential for field testing. I know that a lot of these things can be loaded up over USB or other ways, but FOG’s integrated delivery is just so much better.

I will also throw my hat in the ring on the NFS share issue - we have backups but this hurts the enterprise “strength” of the system simply because people worry about stuff, often unnecessarily. I would also like to see some kind of automated or scripted way of managing the SQL database password for the same reason.

I also like the Linux/Debian/Ubuntu environment for all the reasons others have mentioned, and don’t much see the point of having the core application running on another platform. To me, that is what the web UI, SSL, and RD are for.

Lastly, I am part of the crowd that has yet to face UEFI/GPT in a large way, but I know that it is coming, soon; I agree that this is probably the biggest single issue on the horizon and it does apply to me too.

Beyond that, I honestly think that FOG is nothing short of a godsend, and seeing it in action and how well it works truly amazes me on an almost daily basis, so it is funny to me to hear the “lipstick on a pig” analogy applied to something so amazing!

Thank you again, thank you so much,
D.L.

I am certainly no expert on the FOG Service (although it does work fine for me) but I would venture to guess that your image was joined to the domain/network before it was uploaded. This is not the way to do it; it should be joined to a WORKGROUP (any workgroup).

I have had co-workers swear up and down that “it was [U][B]not[/B][/U] joined to the domain and that it [U][B]was[/B][/U] joined to WORKGROUP” before uploading the image. Then we go and check it and they put:

Member of:
Domain:
WORKGROUP

Workgroup:
(blank, greyed out)

Obviously this is wrong…

I am not saying for sure that is your problem, but maybe. It does look like the FOG service successfully changed the name of your workstation; it was just not able to join the domain.

In my environment I have had the best results with the FQDN as the FOG_AD_DEFAULT_DOMAINNAME and the FQDN%USERNAME% as the FOG_AD_DEFAULT_USER (example):

FOG_AD_DEFAULT_DOMAINNAME: scrantonpa.internal.contoso.com – Not just [B]scrantonpa[/B] (primary domain name)
FOG_AD_DEFAULT_USER: scrantonpa.internal.contoso.com\contosoadmin

Also make sure that your user account (contosoadmin in my example) has full AD privileges to join machines to the domain; IMHO that account does need to be a Domain Admin.

Also the “FOG Passkey” cannot be the same as the password for your Domain Admin account. I foolishly tried this once and it would not work. After I just changed the “FOG Passkey” to something different and re-encrypted my AD password, everything worked great!

Also you did copy over hostnamechange.dll to the FOG service installation directory after you re-compiled it, correct? You MUST have that in place and often people, myself included, forget that step when installing the FOG service on a new image.

Cheers!

Have you updated to the latest BIOS on the test machines? Also check your AHCI/ATA settings in the BIOS; it probably should be set to AHCI but try ATA just for the heck of it.

I do not have much experience with FOG on Linux 12; we are sure that 12.04 works correctly?

Even though no one would use XP, it would help to test the system.

Also have you checked that your image definition is correct syntax and set to Windows 7 type? I know it sounds silly, but often these kinds of problems have a very simple answer.

The only other thing I can think of that would cause that would be bad sectors on the hard drive (source or destination), or bad RAM; but my guess is that you have tried it on enough different hardware to eliminate that possibility??

You cannot simply remove the utility partition and have a successful upload/deploy; then you would have a gap at the start of the disk and that confuses FOG. However, if you did format the disk and re-build the windows image completely then this should not be a problem.

And, yes, try “single partition re-sizable”, that works for almost everything that I do including [U][B]true[/B][/U] single-partition Windows XP and Windows 7 with the 100mb partition (for BitLocker) at the start of the drive. Yes, that is technically 2 partitions, but it is still programmed to work with “single partition re-sizable” setting with default windows 7 setup.

No problem!

Have you tried a non-vmware image to/from an actual Optiplex 755, with kernel 3.3.3, with basic sysprep? That would be a pretty default setup. Also, I should have asked what version of Ubuntu you use for the FOG server? Version 12 of Ubuntu is not supported by FOG 0.32 by default.

Beyond that, try a Windows XP image, or yes, a Linux image although be aware you have to install GRUB, etc. to successfully upload/deploy Linux images. If partitions and files are created when you deploy then it does not seem like a problem with FOG, per se, but something to do with your image. I know that my default setup for Windows 7 images is “single partition, re-sizable” and it works fine even though I do use the 100mb partition at the beginning. I know that this is slightly confusing, but this is the default setup for FOG 0.32 images of windows 7, not the “multi partition, non resizable”; but obviously try both since you are having problems.

I am trying to think of what else it could be…

I am not aware of any way to run automatic diagnostics on the image file itself; that is a good idea though. Of course you can check the size, date, etc. manually and look for obvious errors like a tiny image file or wrong date stamp.

You say that a “windows repair” fixes the machine and it will boot, but earlier you said that BIOS displayed “No Boot Device”; this is slightly confusing to me and slightly contradictory, forgive me. Describe the exact “boot error” process including screens, text, etc; this should be fairly easy to replicate the exact same thing every time.

I have definitely done 755’s successfully with Windows 7 but I have also had a few problems with them. If the outline of the colored windows 7 logo appears for a brief millisecond and the machine cold restarts (with no text) [U]in a constant reboot loop[/U] where the windows 7 logo never “comes together” in the center of the screen, that is almost certainly a sysprep issue; either it is not active or it is not set up correctly. This is a pain, but in windows 7 it does often need sysprep even to deploy the exact same image to/from the exact same machine (slightly mind boggling!). My advice would be to create the most generalized, basic sysprep image that you can (WITH OOBE and WITHOUT unnattend.xml just to test things out) and see if you can get that to load. You want to just run sysprep from a basic windows 7 installation without any fanciness just to test the environment before adding unnattend.xml parameters, etc.

I know that it seems stupidly simple, but see this link for the absolute most basic sysprep deployment:
[media=youtube]t1YUe22fAqg[/media]

I have to head out of the office now and I will be in my garage tonight, so I will not reply immediately, but describe it further and I will see what I can dig up.

Cheers!!

Are you watching the progress bar to make sure that the imaging task completes to 100%? If it stops at 20%-40% and just dumps out (and task scheduler thinks that it is in fact complete!) then you do have a corrupt image or another software problem. I missed this a few times because I was doing something else while it imaged; you get in the habit of not watching because usually it is fine and watching progress bars is boring, but occasionally you have to watch just to make sure…

Also check that your BIOS is fully up to date; that can help. And have you tried a Windows XP image just to test the system? Also you said that you have tried with and without 100mb partition for BitLocker, that is good; but could there be other (utility) partitions on your source hard disk? Check this with Gparted or similar. Also try wiping the disk and checking it with Gparted immediately post-image; are there NTFS partitions created? Or just nothing? If the partitions do exist maybe you can explore them from a test system to see if your files, sofware, etc. are intact post-image.

Beyond that, just send over some more information about your setup and what you have and have not tried; and maybe that will point us in the right direction.

Cheers!

Sounds like the image that you have captured on your FOG server is corrupted somehow…

Have you tried running chkdsk and re-uploading it? Also try different hard drives and different RAM if you have not already because bad hardware can cause things like this.

Maybe if you describe your scenario and how it behaves when it won’t boot, or how you are figuring out that the mbr or bootsector is corrupt, that would help shed some light on it.

It definitely matters what partition type you have selected for your image. If there is in fact a Dell Utility partition, it must be set to “Multiple partitions, single disk” under the image definition.

That being said Dell utility partitions DEFINITELY do cause problems and IMHO they are not useful at all (if you need to boot to a utility partition you can always use a flash drive or CD, but FOG has much of its own diagnostic tools so I have almost never needed this in years of use). Personally, I do not think that it makes sense to have multiple partitions for the average workstation, it just complicates things and creates errors. Certainly if you are using Windows XP single partition is the way to go; if you are on Windows 7 then an argument could be made for single or multiple Windows partitions but still it should not include Dell utility partitions for the reasons you mention (FAT16, Dell partition first on the disk, etc.)

Regarding removing the Dell utility partition, this is very difficult to do while capturing the existing 2nd partition that you actually want to keep (with windows, software, etc). Several years ago, after a few days of trying to do this, I just gave up; I think that it is impossible. I was able to remove it, but then it would not upload/download because there was nothing at the start of the disk (I did try moving the NTFS partition that I wanted to save to the start of the disk, that did not work). My solution was I wiped the drive completely and rebuilt the image with a single NTFS partition (the way it should be). In my case, the only reason I was even trying to do this is because we wanted to save a few images from our old system (Norton Ghost) and they had the Dell utility partitions embedded into them (at the start of the disk!!). As it turned out this was next to impossible and so we just rebuilt our images using a generic DVD install of Windows and everything has been great since then.

Also, just FYI Dell installations of Windows are definitely inferior to Retail or VLK (volume) installations for reasons I will not go into right now. They will work, but a volume installation directly from Microsoft is the way to go, if you can afford it. And personally I would never use the Dell installation that came on the computer’s hard drive, those are bloated and horrible. If you cannot use retail or VLK versions of Windows at least do yourself a favor and install a fresh, single partition installation from the Dell “Windows install media”, so it will not be bloated with junk the way Dell sets them up.

Regards,
David

I have only seen this when there is MAC address filtration active on the network; if you have not added the MAC addresses to the “approved/allowed” list then they will not be given IP addresses and this is the message that you get.

Are you sure that the machines are in fact communicating with the network (DHCP server) correctly? You could test this by just loading into a vanilla Windows installation from DVD (or Linux Live CD) and see if you have an IP address and can get on the network; if you cannot do this then FOG is not the problem.

I seem to remember imaging E6520’s no problem… but perhaps the network adapter is different.