@Sebastian-Roth Is this only related to the macbooks with only USB-C ports? I have fog working (after much trial and error) fine for all of our apple devices up to 2017 model year, but we just started to purchase brand new machines for our staff, and im concerned about not being able to image over the network anymore. I need to buy some USBC to ethernet adapters before I test it, and if I do run into issues ill open a new thread, I just wanted to see if you had any more information before I started troubleshooting this.

Thank you,
Smoblikat

@sebastian-roth I have fog containers running in proxmox, IIRC the issues are mostly related to apparmor profiles and ubuntu. I need to allow specifically allow NFS permissions on a per VM (container) basis in the config file, ive tested with Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04, and currently running 20.04. I think most of this is documented in my internal wiki, I can provide more information if needed.

@shyvvana Is it possible to enable routing from your 10.0.1.0 subnet to the fog server located in your 10.0.0.0 network? Assuming seperate VLANs, you could use a centralized DHCP server to provide addresses for both networks (ip-helper on the first hop of your 10.0.1.0 network) and then point them to the address of your fog server, you wouldnt need to allow the entire /24 to be routable either, just grant it access to the IP of your server/storage nodes and you should be all set.

So I ran some wireshark tests, and from what I see, the issue is completely related to ipxe not being able to use the USB NIC. If I boot the computer with the option key held down, I see DHCP requests flow normally from the machine.

Even sitting in the grub menu on my imaging partition shows a successful DHCP transaction, but as soon as I load into pxe there is 0 activity going on from the network card.

Running ifstat show that the link is up, but there are TX/RX Input/Output errors. Interestingly, the apple NIC behaves slightly differently than my USB C dock, if I unplug and re-plug the apple adapter while in a pxe shell, I can manually run DHCP and it does seem to pick up an address, but I cant ping/communicate with anything (still showing I/O errors). I tried to manually chain the fog server from the pxe shell after getting an address, but it times out. Maybe im using the wrong server path? What would be the correct path to chain from, and would I use http or tftp?

chain http://<my-ip>/tftboot/??

Thank you,
Smoblikat

Proxmox allows LXC container templates. You could easily build your own and use (and share!) that.

Start off with a base template of Ubuntu/whatever and go from there.

@sebastian-roth I have fog containers running in proxmox, IIRC the issues are mostly related to apparmor profiles and ubuntu. I need to allow specifically allow NFS permissions on a per VM (container) basis in the config file, ive tested with Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04, and currently running 20.04. I think most of this is documented in my internal wiki, I can provide more information if needed.

@sebastian-roth Thanks

I do compile my own binaries (tried pre-compiled also), I just compiled ipxe.efi with DEBUG=dhcp, the output I get is:

DHCP 0x60030488 could not transmit UDP packet Input/Output error (ipxe.org/1d6a5498)

https://ipxe.org/err/1d6a54 (looks like dokuwiki, I actually might be able to contribute to this if I ever get it figured out!)

I have not done a wireshark analysis yet, but I need to run one for some weird VOIP issues im having anyway, so I should be able to get to that pretty soon. I will definitely keep you guys posted, thanks for the help!

@smoooo I replied to your pm with the script I use to expand OSX partitions.

Also, the prohibitory symbol (crossed out circle) could also mean an incompatible OS for the hardware, I do a little bit with snow leopard to make it work on unsupported hardware, and it usually involves a kernel swap at a minimum to get old OS’s booting on new hardware.

Not sure if youre still having issues with corestorage or not, but “diskutil cs list” will show you your corestorage groups, which would typically need to be deleted before cloning or modifying partitions (you would get the prohibitory symbol from this too).

Also, just as a random tidbit, you can install OSX on an HFS+ disk all the way up to 10.13 (never tested 10.14+, might still work) if you run the installer from the commandline and use the

–converttoapfs NO

switch for the installer. This might give you a LITTLE bit more flexibility as far as being able to read partitions/volumes from linux utilities (APFS support is much harder to come by).

Hello everyone, I am the network admin for an entirely apple organization. Ive been using fog for years, and I am able to clone all macs/macbooks up to the 2019 model, but now im having some issues with getting it running right on our new 2019 macbooks.

My current setup for imaging consists of a small 400mb partition on the local disk itself (blessed of course) that boots grub and lets me pick from the imaging options. As a temporary workaround to the pxe booting issue, I have a copy of clonezilla on the disk itself that copies itself to RAM and mounts a cifs share to save/restore images from automatically, though this doesnt give me as many features as capturing with fog would (compression size, multicast etc…), it does give me the basic functionality of being able to plug an ethernet cable into a machine and image it over the network.

I compiled my own ipxe binaries from the latest source, and I added debugging output to my ipxe.efi binary. I have tried 3 of the pxe binaries, each giving different results, I have also tried using the pre-compiled fog binaries as well as premade ones from netboot.xyz:

All testing is done with the official apple belkin adapter:
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HJKF2ZM/A/belkin-usb-c-to-gigabit-ethernet-adapter
or this USB C dock:
https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Adapter-Ethernet-MacBook-ChromeBook/dp/B071G83L1J

iPXE.efi - I get ipxe initializing devices…OK!, net0 errors out (internal wifi card) with:

wl_ioctl: dhd_wl_ioctl_cmd failed. cmd 263, ret -14, ifidx = 0
wl_iovar: wlIoctl failed name cur_etheraddr, ret -14
BCMDHD_UNDIStationAddr: error setting cur_etheraddr !

I assume everything that starts with wl is referring to a wireless card, so hopefully shouldnt be having any effect on the ethernet NIC.

Then net1 (ethernet adapter) complains about “no configuration methods succeed”, rinse repeat until I hit a pxe shell.

snp.efi - Same as ipxe

snponly.efi - It goes to load, I see a white block of color, top left says “Welcome to grub” but nothing else appears, normally underneath I would see somthing like:
“iPXE 1.20.1 (version number) Open Source Network Boot Firmware” but the screen just hangs after the intial loading of the binary.

I would be happy to provide any additional information you need, all of my testing is done with either a windows DHCP server or an ISC-DHCP server (I have special apple classes defined in ISC, windows is just option 66 and 67), I also have a pretty decent homelab/multiple test environments at work (plus a wide variety of diverse hardware to test on), so I dont mind getting my hands a bit dirty. I however, am very much NOT a programmer, so im afraid I wont be of much help there

Thank you,
Smoblikat

@sebastian-roth Thank you! Thats exactly what I needed. Now if I could just get it to actually grab an address from DHCP…

EDIT - Which was solved by using snp.efi rather than snponly…

Hello, I am working on a little project to make imaging a little more straightforward for our apple computers. Long story short, where are the files that clients boot off of physically located in the server? I found a few locations (specifically I need the snponly.efi file):
/home/<user>/fogproject/packages/tftp/

That seems to be the most promising, but I dont know for sure, any help would be appreciated.

@Sebastian-Roth Is this only related to the macbooks with only USB-C ports? I have fog working (after much trial and error) fine for all of our apple devices up to 2017 model year, but we just started to purchase brand new machines for our staff, and im concerned about not being able to image over the network anymore. I need to buy some USBC to ethernet adapters before I test it, and if I do run into issues ill open a new thread, I just wanted to see if you had any more information before I started troubleshooting this.

Thank you,
Smoblikat