Posts made by rixter

Am I reading this right, you have windows and debian on the same pc, and on that pc you have fog installed and you want to ghost the windows partiton from the same pc that fog+debian is on? Maybe pulling your hard drive from the other pc, installing it in the pc with windows 7 on it, booting to debian (not windows) and learning how partimage works would be your best option here… You really need fog on a seperate PC than you are trying to pull a ghost from…

First (and this may sound stupid) check for conficker [url]http://www.confickerworkinggroup.org/infection_test/cfeyechart.html[/url]
Second, check in your c:\fog.log If you are having some client issues, it might show up there. Also, do you have any snapins trying to install?
Third, check your system logs, right click my computer, click manage, look at the event logs.
Fourth, scan for spyware, malware, and virus’s, run chkdsk /f and defrag.

If you still have issues with them slowing down, make sure the CPU heatsink isn’t caked down with dust.

If none of the above fixes your issues… Buy new computers

Blackout, are you sure this isn’t an initrd issue? I was thinking I had some issue where I changed out my init file and it took care of something similar to this.

Automatic to what? If you are talking external hard drive or a NAS, creating a small bash script and running it with cron is pretty easy, if you are talking tape, I don’t know as I have never used tape, and for DVD, there are several CLI programs for that, again bash and cron, replace the DVD daily.

First understand that pxe and magic packets are 2 separate things. But yes routers will disrupt the flow of these packets. These type of packets need to be on the same network, and by definition routers separate networks. For instance, if your fog server is on a 10.1.1.2 ip and the netmask is 255.255.0.0, then anything within the 10.1.x.x range would find it, however if you have a router in there so your clients are on the 10.2.x.x network then you will need to add a rule to make 10.1.1.2 able to be seen (if this is possible, its been years since I last configured an actual router, sure I setup some wireless routers, but that just isn’t the same as a cisco 2800 now is it? ) Typically you want to be on the same switch.

Wouldn’t hurt to give [url]http://fogproject.org/forum/threads/pxe-boot-goldmemory.12/page-2#post-368[/url] a shot. It should be fairly easy to setup and might fix your issue.

If it is the 2 default partitions for windows 7 (one is very small ~100 mb and the other is the rest of the disk) you can still use the NTFS Resizable option on it (fog takes into account that it is for windows 7 and allows this). Again IF you can ghost this back to the original machine and pull it again with the resizable option, I’m betting it will fix your issue.

I wouldn’t think that would be it because fog and tftp are on the same pc, although instead of creating the file directly in the /tftpboot directory, does it ‘upload’ it? I don’t know. I will try it tomorrow and see if I can find out.

If you can, deploy that windows 7 image on another machine, create a new image, this time make it resizable, run chkdsk /f, push it back to the server under the new image, then try it again on the machine that is having problems.

If you can’t do this, I am not sure of any other options you have. (possibly creating a partition the exact size of the one from the machine it was pulled from?)

Of course it matters, the reason to run chkdsk is to fix hard drive issue (file index’s, truncated files, etc.) so running it before you upload is very important, as you don’t want corrupted data to be uploaded. ntfsresize is a tool that runs within the fog environment, and if you have disk issues it will normally let you know, but not always. Sysprep only prepares the files and registry for an image creation, it doesn’t touch the disk structure. As a matter of fact, I rarely use sysprep on xp anymore, with windows 7 though its important. Defragging before you image can reduce your image size drastically as well, when you have ‘unorganized’ data spanning across 10 gigs, but only are using 4 gigs of space, it picks the last place on the disk there is data and creates the image based on that. I have solved SEVERAL ghosting issues by using those 2 tools before I upload the image. Even issues that crop up after the deployment can be fixed by that.

It is a fairly new thing.

The problem I always had with memdisk and floppy images was that different vendors handled the pxe stacks differently. Many of my intel machines would work fine, some needed other options to work, and some wouldn’t work at all. From all the reading at the time (this has been a few years back) all the problems were because there is no good pxe standard. I haven’t used it much but gPXE (or is it iPXE now?) might be the first thing you want to load, then pass your other pxe options to it, you will probably get better results that way. From my limited knowledge of this you would probably want to chainload it (according to the ipxe.org website),

[SIZE=4][B][FONT=Lucida Grande][SIZE=18px][COLOR=#000000]Chainloading from an existing PXE ROM[/COLOR][/SIZE][/FONT][/B][/SIZE]

[FONT=Lucida Grande][COLOR=#000000][URL=‘http://ipxe.org/_detail/clipart/chain.jpeg?id=download’][COLOR=#436976][RIGHT][IMG]http://ipxe.org/_media/clipart/chain.jpeg?w=200&h=96[/IMG][/RIGHT][/COLOR][/URL]
You can chainload iPXE from an existing PXE ROM. This is useful if you have a large number of machines that you want to be able to boot using iPXE, but you do not want to reflash the network card on each individual machine.
You can build a chainloadable iPXE image using:
[SIZE=12px] make bin/undionly.kpxe[/SIZE][/COLOR][/FONT]

Good luck.

My win7 images are setup for ‘Single Partiton (NTFS Only, Resizable)’ and seem to work fine (I think fog expects the extra 100mb hidden partition when you tell the image its windows 7). On your XP machine if you still have the original setup, do a defrag, then chkdsk /f, and reboot and let it scan, then reboot at least 2 more times (something I read about a few months ago) and it might fix your issue. You should always chkdsk /f before uploading a windows image.

Memdisk with a floppy image is pretty particular with things, have you tried booting from the cd iso?

An entry like

[code]LABEL GoldMemory
MENU LABEL GoldMemory
LINUX memdisk
append iso initrd=isos/GoldMemory.iso
[/code]
should work.

btw… in this setup I would have the directory isos under /tftpboot (/tftpboot/isos)

When you made the image, did you make it with ‘ntfs resizable’? If not you will need a disk that is the same size (or larger) than the original one. To my understanding, even if the image is only 25 Gig, it will try to write 0’s across the remainder of the disk until it reaches the original size. Someone correct me if I am wrong about this.

This is great. Already found a lot of good info here (not that I didn’t from the original forums, but it was MUCH harder to search) .

Thanks to all who work on or with the fog project in any way.

RiX

If you are willing to wait a few mins, fog will reboot those pc’s and they will catch on the second boot. I have some newer HP’s that do that, some pickup right away, others take a couple of mins, then reboot, then pickup.