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.

https://news.fogproject.org/fog-1-5-10-41-officially-released/

While this maybe spur of the moment, it should officially release 1.5.10 with all relevant bug/security fixes encapsulated (among a few other features.)

This has brought a new methodology of releases in that bug/security releases should be done much more regularly.

dev-branch, historically, was a place where new development occurred (hence its name) but over the last couple of years or so it’s mainly been a bug/security thing, not really a true development approach.

This is OKAY, in my head. Why:

Well we have the master branch which is the ‘baseline’ of a verions. We have the dev-branch, which allows us to work on bugs/security issues. We have the working branches for what will eventually become master. Working is our “dev branch” but keeps proper seperation of things in my opinion.

Basically:
master -> basis for dev-branch (which merges into stable on a regular cadence - still being worked out)
working -> basis of forward development

So we effectively have:
production
staging
development well seperated.

THis may mean on the regular automated releases, no announcement or news article will be created, and I think that’s okay.

Hopefully exciting we have a release after 1.25 years

Thank you!

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/

@tlehrian I don’t have enough information.

Try the latest dev-branch or working-1.6?

@craigcoulson Update to the latest dev-branch and you should be good to go.

@KMEH This might be able to help:
https://docs.fogproject.org/en/latest/management/server/install-fogsettings/

@Valer This should be fixed in latest/greatest

@KMEH This wasn’t somehow. partly it was yours (among all the others) requests for secure boot and some max access to claude that really helped get this more flushed out more properly.

And a lot of mind tossing to get there.

Hopefully you enjoy it and like it (everyone).

@Valer I think we need to understand what this plugin is doing.

CSS isn’t something we’ve allowed to be injectable though it could be.

You can still use your own CSS but that’s more at the FOG Configuration -> FOG Setting -> FOG_THEME, but you would need to put it on your server in a location you type the path too here.

https://docs.fogproject.org/en/latest/development/plugin-development

This is a good toolkit for understanding how to build your own plugin.

@Strahd Have you been able to make progress?

@Valer I was able to replicate and believe I’ve updated the code enough to fix all the issues you were seeing if you don’t mind doing the git pull and re-install.

@Valer For the Storage Group/Storage Node issue, fog doesn’t delete anything when installing.

At most it may alter tables or swap data around but I don’t think that’s what happened here.

I do see it showing 12 storage groups, I don’t see your screen for storage nodes. I’ll see if I can replicate the problem there. Confusing why it shows 12 to 1 of 1 entry? A little strange

Refind needing being signed, makes sense. The Secureboot stuff we worked on was mostly concerned with the flow from IPXE -> Kernel, I didn’t think about the refind file. I’ll see if I can address that.

Can you tell me what schema version you’re on?

MariaDB [fog]> select * from schemaVersion;
+-----+--------+
| vID | vValue |
+-----+--------+
|   1 |    323 |
+-----+--------+
1 row in set (0.000 sec)

Is what you should see. 323 is the latest which injects that new Task item, that said if your machine is in legacy boot, (non-uefi) you won’t be presented with the menu.

If you can give me:

SELECT vValue FROM schemaVersion;
SELECT pxeID, pxeName FROM pxeMenu ORDER BY pxeID;

@Strahd At the least I’d suggest downloading an export of your hosts/images:

From there you can delete the database or rebuidl from scratch by:

mysql -u root If you have a password on your db I don’t know it but use the -p and you’ll be prompted to enter it.

DROP DATABASE fog;

Will delete everything.

From there, I still highly recommend you delete the /opt/fog/.fogsettings

Then rerun the installer.

I’m still going to say use working-1.6 as the testbed.

I hate that you’re having issues and I assure you I’m unable to replicate the problem you’re currently having which makes trying to fix your specific case impossible of course.

Hope this helps.

I’d still (at the least) get a full backup of your DB just in case something goes horribly wrong.