Can we somehow add a template for forum posts. We’d be able to save a lot of asking questions about OS/FOG version and stuff like that. Perfect would be a pre filled text in the compose text box. Or some kind of forum rules for all the new people who find the forum through the website. As visible as possible - maybe in the forum front page? Just a few ideas.

And second… didn’t we have a category for forum related things like this? I cannot find it. Searching for posts that I knew should be in that category can still be found by the search but are somehow gone, like this one: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/6521/search-box-opens-two-tabs-instead-of-one

What should go into the template?

• FOG version (see in the blue cloud on the web interface or in the installer logs)
• server OS / version
• image settings like image type + OS ID
• …
• Hints on where to find other valuable information (as well pointing people to possibly fix the issue themselves):
  • Apache error logs (debian/ubuntu: /var/log/apache2/error.log, centos/fedora/rhel: /var/log/httpd/error_log)
  • Install logs (fogproject/bin/error_logs)

@george1421 said in virtio support:

Should we provide a link to the current script in the wiki

Great idea! Added…

Back in the old days FOG did not capture the MBR (now in d1.mbr) and partition table (d1.partitions) information when uploading an image from a client. So even today FOG trunk needs to do assumptions on start sector, partition size and layout. This is mostly working if people have a standard windows setup but can also fail which is very hard and time consuming to debug. Read through this if you are interested. And I am sure there are other posts on failing legacy images.

Trying to improve legacy partimage compatibility my first attempt was to extract the start sector from the rec.img.000 file and patch the MBR on the fly after deploying the default MBR file (e.g. win7.mbr), which we ship with FOG.
After playing with this for a bit and trying it out it seemed rather sketchy to me. Plus this would be something we need to do on every deploy with those legacy images. So I had the idea to extract the information and build the MBR and partition layout files via a script that people can run on their server. It would search through all the images and simply add d1.mbr and d1.partitions in case those files are missing.

This idea has been around for a good week and I talked to Tom about it already. So today I got myself together and started working on it. Extracting the information from rec.img.000 is not too hard. But as I was digging through this file I discovered that partimage includes the original MBR into rec.img.000 on capture. Surprise! I am sure the old FOG gang knew this long before I stumbled upon it. Nevermind.

So what does this mean? I found partimage to have a restmbr (restore MBR) mode/command. Using this we should be able to write the original MBR from the partimage file and don’t need to do any assumptions on start sectors and partition layout. But wait - there are two issues with that:

• partimage restmbr command seems to not want to accept destination device as command line parameter yet (I was only able to restore via ncurses GUI) - guess we can come up with a patch for that
• resizable image type is another story if we take this route - I am sure we can figure this out but I haven’t had enough time to think it all through yet

Just wanted to get this out to you guys before I spent more time on this. Possibly you think this is all crap and that we shouldn’t bother about all that legacy stuff anyway. Open for discussion! Please let me know what you think of it.

@george1421 Good catch! But taking a closer look I kind of doubt that this is the same issue. Here we have a legacy image (partition layout information not available!) but with the Optiplex 3020 the image seems to be a fresh new one from what I understand - totally different I guess.

@Zourous To get around the default start sector 63 you can “simply” add partition layout description files to your image on the FOG server. Create two text files with the following content (make sure you get all the numbers right!):

• /images/BASE32STD2015/d1.fixed_size_partitions

1:

• /images/BASE32STD2015/d1.partitions

label: dos
label-id: 0x86308630
device: /dev/sda
unit: sectors

/dev/sda1 : start=        2048, size=      204800, type=7, bootable
/dev/sda2 : start=      206848, size=   312374960, type=7

Then try deploying the image again. Please let us know if this is working for you!?

@Wayne-Workman Well I think the issue with Ubuntu is that Zesty (17.04) is history since 13th of January 2018! Seems like it’s gone from the official mirrors now too.
See here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZestyZapus/ReleaseNotes and https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

Ubuntu 17.04 will be supported for 9 months until January 2018. If you need Long Term Support, it is recommended you use Ubuntu 16.04 LTS instead.

@prestop I don’t understand why you refuse to share the pictures. I might look all fine for your eyes but possibly we see things you are not aware of yet. I am more than willing to help out (otherwise I wouldn’t be active in the forums) but I refuse to help without getting information. This is no personal thing - so please don’t get me wrong. I’d love to help you out. But reading all your posts over and over I just don’t know enough to be able to help.

I am not saying that we’ll be able to fix things for you the second you post pictures but you increase the chance of getting help a lot!

@andyb2000 Thanks for your patience! So basically there are two mechanisms you can use for what you want to achieve. One is hooks (that you already know) and the other one is events.

So to answer your question. The Post_Stage3.php is still the right place (for end of deploy) but the actual code is being refactored and moved to lib/reg-task/taskqueue.class.php (ref). So you were on the right track already. Either hook HOST_TASKING_COMPLETE or event HOST_IMAGE_COMPLETE should work for you. For examples see lib/plugins/windowskey/hooks/changehostkey.hook.php or lib/plugins/slack/events/imagecomplete_slack.event.php (note hook and event in the filename).

I’m also looking to tie in (again preferably with the Hook ->register function in my plugin) to when an image is triggered to be deployed to a host, I need to call a function before the host is WOL’d so what would be the register code for that?

You want to use HOST_DEPLOY_POST or GROUP_DEPLOY_POST hook (code ref) for that - first one for single host tasking and the later one for group tasking. Mind you those hooks apply for deploy and capture tasking - the name of the hook might be a bit misleading here.

Great to hear that you guys found a workaround to this. Thanks a lot for the pcap file anyway. It actually shows exactly what the error message is saying. I wouldn’t believe it if it wasn’t in the pcap! That machine is requesting not just undionly.kpxe but undionly.kpxe\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377\377....
Looks like it’s padding the string with EOL (end of line) symbols. I have no idea why that is. If PXE booting is working fine for you with all the other machines you are perfectly fine with booting this one via the iPXE cd image! Don’t bother about it.

@Wayne-Workman Looks like a hickup. I just did a quick test on a fresh ubuntu VM I had at hand. Installing php7.1-gd with libgd3 as dependency worked great!

...
Get: 9 http://ppa.launchpad.net/ondrej/php/ubuntu/ trusty/main libgd3 amd64 2.2.5-4+ubuntu14.04.1+deb.sury.org+2 [131 kB]
...
Selecting previously unselected package libgd3:amd64.
Preparing to unpack .../libgd3_2.2.5-4+ubuntu14.04.1+deb.sury.org+2_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking libgd3:amd64 (2.2.5-4+ubuntu14.04.1+deb.sury.org+2) ...
...

@mageta52 said:

Will the logs show how many addresses are leased? Is there some place i can check?

DHCP leases should be in /var/lib/dhcp/dhcpd.leases. At least it is here on debian. My syslog is saying this when I restart the DHCP service:

...
... dhcpd: Wrote 22 leases to leases file.
...

Or use dnsmasq in proxy mode!? Although I have to admit that I don’t find dnsmasq’s proxy mode to be that good - it has limitations when it comes to serving BIOS and UEFI - it still might be a way to go for you.

But as Wayne already said, adding PXE booting options to the existing DHCP server is definitely the best way to go and shouldn’t conflict with anything in your network. Talk to your network guys.

@george1421 Thanks heaps for bringing this up! I will continue to answer in a minute… Ok, deleted mine as well to not confuse anyone.

I don’t see your points as something we need to delay for FOG 1.6 but could possibly bring into 1.5.x already as a testing stage.

1. Force the installer to provide a database password for root in mysql. […]

Absolutely! Funny but I have started looking into this already before Christmas as I really would like to have FOG enforce secure passwords for exactly the same reasons. I just have not found enough time to think it through and test things. I’d even go as far as creating a FOG database user to be used (good practice) but still enforce passwords for root and fog DB user! Will look into that in the first days of 2019.

2. Change the default webgui admin account from fog and password to […]

I am with you here about the default password. But as we have briefly discussed in another thread I tend to rename the FOG web UI user (instead of the fog linux account). Maybe default to admin but even make it so people can choose their own.

3. Change the fog service account from fog to fogsvc to avoid confusion with the webui user of the same name […]

As mentioned above I’d prefer renaming the web UI account name and leave this one. I’d still force the account to be no-login! I need to think more about how we prevent users from using this account like create it beforehand and then being locked out or if they do use it right now on an existing installation. There are options like checking wtmp and stuff to see if the account has been used for login and warn the user but I have not gone into depth here.

@george1421 Let’s see if we can discuss this a different way other than through hidden posts. Might move the discussion a chat session here in the forums or to slack.
@Tom-Elliott What are your thoughts on this? Would be great to get your comments on this topic before I start changing this in 1.5.x already.

Yes, please post FOG version, ls -al /images/<img-name> and the contents of d1.partitions, d1.original.partitions, d1.minimum.partitions, d1.fixed_size_partitions, d1.original.fstypes (whichever of those are available) plus upload d1.mbr (as well small file) just to make sure we have all the valuable information available. I’ll check it out over the weekend.

Did some more testing and will merge this into dev-branch now before the new release. Have tested on CentOS (existing installation and fresh) as well as Debian (fresh installation). Should be good to go.

@coco65 See this: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/6926/setting-up-fog-password-fails-on-clean-new-centos-7-install

Most probably you haven’t properly configured or turned off SElinux!

Moving this to FOG problems as I am pretty sure this is not a bug.

Didn’t know that there are Surface Pro 3 devices with eMMC HDD…

...
[    2.163894] mmc0: MAN_BKOPS_EN bit is not set
[    2.187891] mmc0: new HS200 MMC card at address 0001
[    2.188108] mmcblk0: mmc0:0001 HCG8e 58.2 GiB 
[    2.188172] mmcblk0boot0: mmc0:0001 HCG8e partition 1 4.00 MiB
[    2.188245] mmcblk0boot1: mmc0:0001 HCG8e partition 2 4.00 MiB
[    2.217676]  mmcblk0: p1 p2 p3 p4 p5

To make this work you have to set 'Host Primary Disk tp ‘/dev/mmcblk0’ (without the quotes!) in the host settings of this particular devices/host. Please report back.

@moses The paths are different for different FOG versions. If I remember correctly you are using FOG trunk. So please take a look at /var/www/{html/,}fog/lib/fog/config.class.php

Guess we should update the #wiki!

Just for the records: I do PXE boot qemu on my laptop to test FOG stuff all the time. No trouble!

$ sudo tunctl -t tap0 -u <username>
$ sudo ifconfig tap0 x.x.x.x netmask 255.255.255.0 up
$ qemu-img create -f qcow2 hdd.qcow2 10G
$ qemu -m 512 -boot n -net nic,vlan=1 -net tap,vlan=1,ifname=tap0,script=/bin/true -hda hdd.qcow2

This is not a briged setup but all running on a virtual LAN only on that computer. So you’d have to configure tftp and dhcpd to properly serve on NIC tap0 and IP x.x.x.x

@Matthieu-Jacquart You have all the interesting and uneasy hardware around man.

Thank god we have been through this about two month ago already. Check out this posts…

Solution: Add pci=noacpi as a kernel parameter to the host (Host Configuration).

Guess we could add this to the #wiki at some point…

Looks pretty good to me. To make this work you need to set “Host Primary Disk” to ‘/dev/mmcblk0’ (without the quotes!) in the host settings of this particular host. Please give it a try and see if you can upload an image…

Well you still got the old CDROM repo entries while the CDs are probably not loaded anymore. You want to use the official online repos. Edit that file to make it look like this:

deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian jessie main
deb-src http://httpredir.debian.org/debian jessie main

deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian jessie-updates main
deb-src http://httpredir.debian.org/debian jessie-updates main

deb http://security.debian.org/ jessie/updates main
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ jessie/updates main

Remove all the other stuff.