Posts made by Robin Commander

I’m perhaps a little unusual in that all of my ‘customers’ are vehicle based laptops rather than desktops. Add to this that I’m not allowed to make any sort of connection to the company LAN (which sports very potent network access control anyway) and I have to have FOG on an isolated network.

At home though for my sandpit system like yourself I’m running pfSense on a repurposed Watchguard appliance with it doing the dhcp and tftp stuff.

I really expected that a reboot of the FOG server would have cleared the dhcp leases. We live and learn…

Cheers
Robin

Why does a small crisis only ever happen when you have 200 or so machines to image and a looming deadline ?

Had a ‘brown afterburner’ moment today when my production FOG server (Ubuntu 12.04 LTS ‘Alternate’ 64 bit / Fog 1.2 stable release with FOG doing the dhcp and tftp serving) all of a sudden just decided it wasn’t going to hand out any more IP addresses thank you very much. All the services were running happily and a restart didn’t clear the problem.

It turned out to be that the dhcpd.conf file had a very limited scope - just 25 addresses, and a default lease time of around 7 days. The scope was probably my fault because I’d set the IP address of the Fog server to something daft - 192.168.1.75 instead of something more sensible like 192.168.1.10, but the very odd thing was that rebooting the server didn’t seem to release the previously offered dhcp leases ? Wierd. Editing the dhcpd.conf file to more sensible numbers has fixed the issue.

Anyway, just in case this helps somebody in future…

Cheers
Robin

Hi Tom,

Confirmed, it is now working nicely.

Thanks for your assistance, I can’t imagine ever getting this sort of speedy response even from a paid support contract… you’re a star

Hi Tom,

I’ve just run the update for SVN 2754 and as you thought, no change. Are there any particular logs I can send you that might help in tracking the bug ?

Kind Regards,
Robin

I installed the SVN 2732 release and have now found that when a client starts up a disc surface test session it displays a message “* Unable to find a suitable Storage Node for transfer!” repeatedly. SVN 2749 seems to do the same thing too.

Previous to SVN 2732 installation everything was OK. All of the config settings appear to be as they were before. It’s only my sandpit system so not causing me grief for production.

In case it’s relevant, this system has dualled network adapters as the default interface, set up as bond0, and two hdds in software raid 1 mounted at boot as /images

Any ideas ?

Cheers
Robin

Edit - Sorry, just realised I should have posted this in the Bugs section - apologies, please move as you see fit :oops:

Working nicely on Fog v1.2 stable release, SVN 2094:

Note that we have Secureboot / UEFI disabled and CSM enabled in the bios…

[LIST]
[]Panasonic Toughpad FZ-G1 tablet pc
[]Intel QM77 Express chipset
[]PXE version - default
[]Kernel - default
[]Date November 2014
[]Image type - Single disk, multiple partition (Win 8.1 Ent. 64 bit)
[/LIST]
Cheers
Robin

Most odd, I’ve been using Fog for about 6 years now and have never seen anything like that. Perhaps something went wrong when the database schema was being set up ?

I’d try a reinstall. Failing that over to one of the clever people on the forum

Cheers
Robin

Confirmed, reports are OK now using SVN 2725. I was seeing the same problem as Ray when I tested earlier.

Cheers
Robin

Hi Sher,

Go to Image Management > Create New Image and you’ll see the fields that you need to set. In there there is one called Operating system where you click on the dropdown and set the type appropriately. For Windows 7 (irrespective of 32 or 64 bit) you’ll need to set this to type 5.

HTH

Cheers
Robin

I must be going blind - can’t see any links to a .pdf (or any link in fact) on the first post naaceer ?

Excellent work Tom, I can see that I will personally find this very useful.

Just one question - do you ever sleep ?

Could I trouble you for a link to this too please ? Thanks in advance

I guess it does depend on the device’s BIOS. I’m currently building 215 Panasonic G1 Toughpads on Win8.1 and my colleague who has produced the build decided early on to disable UEFI. On these units there is also a ‘CSM’ function which I believe can help with the problems you’re seeing.

Nothing like that on these HP’s ?

Cheers
Robin

I’ve had this before with brand new hdd’s on Panasonic Toughbooks.
Boot from a GParted live usb stick or cd and see if the ssd is flagged with a yellow warning triangle. If it is, use GParted to put a bog standard MS-DOS partiton table on the drive, then try Fog again. Always works for me.

Cheers
Robin

Hi from another Linux noob

There’s some information here that will help: [url]http://www.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/Upgrade_to_trunk[/url]

Kind Regards,
Robin

Hi Tom,

Thanks for the update I’d forgotten that init_32 would also need to be amended.

One thing though, on my box (Ubuntu 12.04 LTS alternate + added desktop + Webmin) there is no /var/www/fog/html folder, hence i’d gone to /var/www/fog/service/ipxe

My original posting worked, at least for init.xz anyway. The test laptop was happily sitting there waiting for a keypress when I woke up this morning. Perhaps the filepath has changed between the latest and stable releases of Fog ? Anyway I’m a happy bunny.

Would it be possible to add this change to the next version please ? It doesn’t make any sense for badblocks to write test results to the screen and then allow a reboot before you’ve had a chance to see them does it ?

Kind Regards,
Robin

Apologies - the first line should read cd /var/www/fog/service/ipxe

The fog.surfacetest file can be found within /var/www/fog/service/ipxe/mountdir/bin

Should have made better notes as I was doing this ! :oops:

Solved I think… In case anyone else is wondering the same thing…

I happened on an earlier forum post from ‘G0dzilla’ here where somebody was trying to get Clam AV working.

[url]http://fogproject.org/forum/threads/centos-clamav-and-fog-1-2-0.11508/[/url]

Using the information within I realised that i needed to modify /var/www/fog/service/ipxe/init.xz - it needs to be decompressed and temporarily mounted first to allow the fog.surfacetest file to be edited and then compressed again afterwards.

So basically:

cd /var/www/html/fog/service/ipxe
xz -d init.xz
mkdir mountdir
mount -o loop init mountdir
cd mountdir
Edit the fog.surfacetest file to add a line: read -p “Any key to continue…”; just before the script would normally end
Save the file changes
cd …
umount mountdir
xz -z -9 -C crc32 init
rmdir mountdir

That’s it I hope - just testing now.

Thanks for the inspiration G0dzilla !

Kind Regards,
Robin

Hi everyone, I’m hoping somebody can point me in the right direction please ?

I have Fog 1.2.0 (stable release version) installed on my new server and it is working beautifully - kudos and thanks to all of the developers.

I had modified the init.gz image on my old server which was running Fog 0.32 so that when I used the Basic Tasks > Advanced > Disk Surface Scan functionality I could make the client sit and wait for a keypress. In this way I was able to leave a group of client machines testing their hdd’s, go off and do something else and come back later to look at the results and hence know if I needed to swap a faulty hdd out before re-imaging.

Previously I’d just added a line: read -p “Any key to continue…” at the end of the relevant script file, but in Fog 1.2.0 the relevant files have changed and I’m at a loss as to what file to edit now and how to get to it within the boot image ?

Kind Regards,
Robin

The NIC bonding isn’t difficult to achieve, I just followed the guide at [url]https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuBonding[/url]. There’s also a handy guide on a similar vein at [url]http://www.beyondvm.com/2014/03/quick-tip-bonding-lacp-and-vlans-in-linux/[/url] which adds some of the Cisco CLI commands

My etc/network/interfaces ended up as:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth1
iface eth1 inet manual
bond-master bond0

auto eth2
iface eth2 inet manual
bond-master bond0

auto bond0
iface bond0 inet static
address 192.168.1.60
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.1
dns-nameservers 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4
bond-mode 4
bond-miion 100
bond-lacp-rate 1
bond-slaves eth1 eth2

… which provides for a single ‘bond0’ virtual network interface that you set up beforehand and refer to as the main interface when installing Fog. If you want even more network bandwidth you could add another two port card and add these interfaces as eth3 and eth4 into the mix too but the limit would be the disk throughput I guess - and the network infrastructure. As everything is isolated and local the latter isn’t an issue for me.

Of course you do need a lan switch that supports LACP (a.k.a 802.3ad). On my sandpit system at home I have another N36L Microserver with a two port pcie-e (Intel) network card running into ports 1 &2 on a DLink DGS-3324SR switch. The latter was pretty easy to set up for LACP from its web interface. For the Cisco '3750 I may need to do some reading

I’m very interested to see what performance the ssd’s will achieve on my new box. I figured that the vast majoriy of the time as I’ll be reading from them when imaging back to the G1 tablets I shouldn’t see problems related to trim settings. Time will tell !

HTH
Robin