I know I’ve been out of this for a little bit. I check in here or there, but just been extremely busy.

I don’t want to stop contributing, I just am taking time for myself after my workly duties.

I have to give a big gratitude and thanks for everyone here trying to help out whether by code, by helping the rest of the community, or documentation.

@Sebastian-Roth I know you’re busy but you’ve kept the project rolling even with the minimal availability you have. Thank you.
@george1421 I’m sure you’re busy, but I still see you posting and helping where possible and amenible. Thank you.
@Wayne-Workman I know you’re helping where you can as well. (Of course I can’t exactly post everybody because I’ve been busy and honestly not keeping up with the forums as much as I probably should.)

@everyone Thank you. Thank you for still believing in this project. We’re doing the best with what we have. Please understand in we’re lacking, it’s most likely unintentional. I know I’m just busy.

https://news.fogproject.org/fog-1-3-5-and-client-0-11-11-officially-released/

https://news.fogproject.org/fog-1-5-0-rc-11/

TLDR; Rerun the fog installer if you have lost “Database Connectivity” to your fog server, or run the ALTER USER syntax shown below.

So Ubuntu 16, among others I suppose, enable a “security updates” to be applied automatically as a “default” to things. Why, well it makes it simpler to ensure your Ubuntu systems are in compliance and patched for any potential exploits. This causes unknown and unexpected issues.

I figured it’d be a safe thing to express that there could be problems (as many of you have already experienced) that when these updates go up (with or without your knowledge) it can break functionality in unexpected and inopportune ways.

The quickest fix is to simply rerun the fog installer which should correct the problem.

As a note, it seems this problem is specific only when the mysql account is the 'root' user AND the password is blank.

The “fix” if you must do it manually is to open a terminal and obtain root:
Super (Windows Key) + T then sudo -i (in most cases).

From there, open mysql with mysql -u root

NOTE: MySQL MUST be run with ROOT.

Run:

ALTER USER 'root'@'127.0.0.1' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY ''; AND
ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY '';

It’s okay if one of them fails. This is going to fix Most people’s issues.

I would highly recommend removing the unattended-upgrades as many of these “sudden” issues came as a security patch ubuntu pushed out. By default Ubuntu typically set’s this for you as enabled and it can cause havoc on you as you (the admin) may not have “done” anything.

To prevent this problem from happening in the future you could run:

apt-get -y remove unattended-upgrades (AS Root again).

FOG is still actively being developed. It’s not necessarily readily apparent, but we can assure you things are still being worked on. These updates may not be communicated in a way that everybody just knows, but can easily be seen if one were to look at our repository site.

Between our own schedules and lives, we can get very busy. We try to keep things updated and help out on the forums even during lull periods. This might mean we aren’t pushing an RC or release as frequently. It may mean we’re working on other things for the project, such as can be seen if looking at our github site.

Our forums are heavily active, and this should point as an indicator to our “status” as well.

If anybody would like to see an increase in developers donating their time to making this free software, consider donating either with monetary support or by spending personal time to help with development.

FOG is an open source project - it’s even in the name. It is driven by people donating their time and resources. The releases of FOG revolve around when developers can spare a few hours throughout the week. Sometimes that will mean releases will be further, sometimes that will mean releases will be faster. That’s just the nature of our project, and many other open source projects.

Hey everybody,

I know you see me here on occasion from time to time. Life decisions have made it more difficult for me to do things I would normally be doing. Rest assured, I am still around, and while I’m not quite as active as I was in the past, it’s not because I don’t want to be.

I had to move, and as part of that I have none of my normal development stuff readily available. Part of the move made me not have a laptop, until today.

I need to setup my dev environment again, so it may take a little bit, but I will be back up.

That’s correct. The main reason fog is constantly moving forward is because the codebase is improved upon. Major bugs tend to be addressed for the next release. We don’t do an LTS because there’s really two main people working on fog in a consistent manor. Those two are @Joe-Schmitt and myself. Debian and Libreoffice have the team too be able to perform such a feat. Their product is Opensource but they have an employment team which can afford them that luxury. FOG has a team but we make no money and as such are required to work full time jobs. We work on FOG in our free time. I’ve had the ability to even work on it from work because we used the software.

Maintaining many different versions is difficult. And we don’t have a support team. WYSIWYG and I think we’ve done pretty well on support, even if we don’t have the ability to do dedicated support for our product. 1.5 was a major step toward modernizing the GUI. 1.6 will vastly improve on this. It was only recently we kind of came up with a road map on how best to proceed. Of note, 1.5 will be maintained until 1.6 is released. 1.6 is focused on making he GUI much more modern. 1.7 will be focused mostly toward fixing and refactoring the FOG client. 1.8 will focus on making the FOS system more modular and usable. I don’t know yet for 1.9. 2.0 will bridge the gap for our rewrite based on the work from 1.5 and up. While we do plan to try to do backports where possible, it’s much easier to ask people to update to the latest version than it is to try to maintain many different versions with backports in mind. At least for what FOG does.

I doubt this will appease anybody, but it’s what I think needs to be said. We are working hard and provide support for our product as best we can. The community makes fogs support system, I think, one of the best around. Add to that and you can almost always have a developer working side by side to help and fix issues as they come up, I don’t think it’s unfair to ask users to update to a specific version. Even if there are bugs, we will always try to correct what we can, when we can. (And normally it’s a pretty quick turn around).

I’m not perfect and I’ll give you that. We don’t even have a test suite to know if things are working as intended. We have to rely on the community and suggestions are great, just understand our answers won’t always be what people want to hear.

https://news.fogproject.org/fog-1-4-0-officially-released/

https://news.fogproject.org/fog-1-4-4-officially-released/

https://news.fogproject.org/fog-1-5-0-rc-12/

@Small0145 Sure, but it still seems like the golden image had this issue. How it got there I don’t know. I would suggest attempting to boot windows, perform the chkdsk/scandisk as needed. Then shutdown (may need to re-sysprep) after running this command. Windows 11, to my knowledge, can be a little bit strange sometimes.

@Small0145 powercfg /h off

Most of the time, the reason people see this is “shutdown” goes into a special mode called “Fastboot” which works similarly by flipping the dirty bit on the drive.

The command I posted here should prevent “fast log” so when you shutdown, the machine ACTUALLY powers off without any dirty bit.

@skyhawk3355 FOG has been able to be loaded into 256mb of ram for quite some time.

It was originally configured for 128MB of ram, but that was in 2007.

If we know how much RAM is on the actual machine?

I believe all our kernels and init need at least 200mb of ram to operate.

@Eazis YEah, my suspicions correct, this far at least.

You can try downloading rod’s latest kernel:
https://github.com/rluzuriaga/fos/releases/download/EXP_20250617/bzImage

I doubt it will work, but who knows…

@Eazis IF you can boot in and run ip link show

@Eazis Well, what I’m seeing is that the 8125 isn’t being detected at all, and I’m not really sure why at this point. The kernel you tested with has all 8125 firmware associated, as well the driver set to load it. So I’m at a lost as to why it’s not loading that specific thing. The network is detected, but not loaded for some reason. More simply, it seems the kernel can see and tell the type of device, but for whatever reason it doesn’t actually want to load it as a potential interface as being available.

I’m unsure where to go until this portion can work and without one of these myself, it’s really difficult to guess about in the dark.

@Jim-Holcomb So unfortunately i’m not readily available for a remote assist due to work requirements and duties so I apologize.

@Jim-Holcomb said in [BUG] iPXE Boot Loop & Menu Failure After FOG 1.5.10.1660 Upgrade:

After upgrading to the latest FOG version, my PXE boot environment is broken. What used to work flawlessly is now a disaster. PXE clients either hang, enter a loop, or display autoexec.ipxe not found. Sometimes pressing ESC brings up a green DOS-style login prompt, then fails to chainload. Sometimes they hang on “Booting…” indefinitely.

So this “autoexec.ipxe not found” always shows. This is not an issue. It’s simply saying there’s no file called autoexec.ipxe on your /tftpboot folder. It’s NOT whatever was causing ipxe boot issues. I’m guessing this PXE boot environment was broken due to whatever was changed?

As to the selective hard drive. I’m not sure I understand what is wrong here. YOu watched it write ONLY to the /dev/nvme drive but somehow it wrote to both the sda and the nvme? Something doesn’t sound right there. Single Disk resizable and Multiple Partition Single disk shoudl only write to a single drive and be done. Do you have video of this process writing to both? I only ask because seeing this in action will help me understand where the code is flawed. To my knowledge, however, it seems more likely that at some point before you wrote to the NVME it had accidentally written to the SDA drive, then you try to figure out how to have it write to the NVME. Then, finally, it was able to write to the NVME, but now it LOOKS like it wrote to both because the SDA drive was never cleared out?

And yes, d1.mbr is absolutely correct. That’s how it initializes the disk.

@Jim-Holcomb Is it just this one machine having this problem or ALL your machines are using bzImage32?

@Jim-Holcomb I’m seeing you have boot access enabled?

I don’t know why bzImage32 is being loaded.

Seems to me you likely need to check the host or global kernel settings. 64 bit kernel should be defined to bzImage This would show up under global configurations (FOG COnfiguration Page -> FOG Settings) “TFTP_PXE_KERNEL” should be set to bzImage
TFTP_PXE_KERNEL_32 should be set to bzImage32

THe other place to test would be under the host directly -> Host Kernel.

Please check that those are set appropriately.

@Jim-Holcomb Not all updates will force a db update. That is normal.

Looking at the error in question now that it’s been shown more clearly.