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/

@jfernandz https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4713088/how-do-i-use-git-bisect

This is just very basic overview and probably unhelpful.

If you’re familiar with git, you can switch to different points in time (via the dev-branch) to figure out when we last knew things were good. So first, I’d suggest trying to find exactly when that would’ve been.

I’d likely start, using dev-branch as the primary “tester case”

git checkout -b dev-branch

If you haven’t already done so of course.

Then I’d put the branch at the same level as when we pushed out 1.5.10:

git checkout 081d1f4

Run your install and see if things worked, if they do:

git checkout dev-branch
git bisect start
git bisect bad
git bisect good 081d1f4

Of course the 081d1f4 is the hash of the commit where things were good: this might or might not be the 1.5.10 release, so your mileage may very and may need some more adjustment.

You can find these hashes on https://github.com/FOGProject/fogproject/commits/dev-branch/?after=f7fd3a7a3f188b4540f089a7f38c4d368b53376c+174 using the different pages at the bottom to find a point in time, and they show the hashes on the right and side of each commit.

It will iterate through things and you just mark after each install/test what worked (as good or bad) by testing:

If it still fails, you’d run git bisect bad, if it succeeds, you would run git bisect good each iteration.

It’s tedious I know. but it will help us find the exact point things broke and hopefully from what (maybe it’s something we did, maybe something within ipxe, but gives us a starting point to test things out.)

Thanks

@jfernandz It’s probably a combination of both. At least, best what i can tell about the 3930’s at least?

Either way, similar to the post about bisect, below, might help us out as well.

I mean firmware nearly always plays a part in things, but that’s not to say that something with the iPXE code is not at fault, either.

@jegan1337 That’s possible, that maybe something is missing (or was removed from IPXE)

If someone’s able to do a git bisect, figure out when it worked, figure out when it stopped.

Likely you would first do:

1.5.10

now

then use bisect to let it jujmp around and until you see when it narrows down exactly when it broke?

@jfernandz next-server comes from the dhcp server option 66 (I think that’s what it is in Windows DHCP at least?)

That said, often when next-server is empty it’s usually because there’s multiple dhcp servers trying to tell the same single client their next-server and it doesn’t know which one to use, so it just goes blank. That’s not to say it couldn’t be a firmware issue, but just expressing my past experiences.

As for the Keyboard:

@AxeMeAQuestion22 @jfernandz

The “legacy” setting shouldn’t be a Firmware related/removed thing. It’d be under (generally) the USB options of the BIOS settings. Not “Legacy BIOS modes” or anything. Specifically it’d usually be surrounding the USB specifically.

Now, I don’t have this particular gear, so I could be wrong, just again speaking from prior experiences of many different systems (in general.)

Edit:

Looking for what I see, if you’re using 3rd party keyboards (non standard that came with the system, or basic basic keyboards, it seems lenovo just might drop them beyond initial key entries (f1 for bios setup mode or whatever.)

https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkCentre-A-E-M-S-Series/M90q-gen-5-usb-keyboard-not-working-in-bios/m-p/5358388

This isn’t quite the same machine, but just kind of describing what I was thinking about with the USB Keyboard/Legacy Support.

@Clebboii So, you could use the 5.15.67 and earlier versions (whatever they actually may be) and all will be fine?

@jflash said in Lenovo ThinkPad L14 Gen 5 - kernel panic:

d. RTL8111/8168

Can you try with the realtek.efi file?

@Jim-Holcomb You should disable Secure boot

@AxeMeAQuestion22 Do the BIOS options have a “Legacy USB” mechanism to them?

@jflash so you changed it in mikrotek which is correct. however I believe your machines are also runnign with secure boot enabled, which often is what we see or somethign more along the lines of straight error loading, though freezing is more often what i recall from Lenovo, at least long ago when I first started seeing them.

@jflash Bootfilename should be snp.efi, or snponly.efi (if using UEFI booting) or one of the other ipxe files.

Having the bootfile be your kernel is likely the reason you’re seeing this issue.