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/

@Strahd Can you please get the output of the line:

grep -P 'Subsystem.*sftp' /etc/ssh/sshd_config

It should output something like:

Subsystem       sftp    internal-sftp

If it does not look like the above, edit the file (as root) look for the matched line and make it look like the above, then restart sshd service (systemctl restart sshd)

Thank you,

@gmaurice The host that you provided the log from is most definitely going to have the “Reset Encryption Data” because that token existing in the first place is what produces the “Invalid security token”.

If you’re saying this “same” message is happening on all machines in your fleet, I’m not sure how that is possible and suspect you’re seeing similar but very different messages?

@rdr This issue you described, should be fixed.

@rdr It’s okay, though topics would probably be better for SEO reasons but we will answer the questions generally.

This should be harmless to run with these bu tyou’re right. If you didn’t make any custom changes then why is it arguing about it?

I will see what I can do about this.

Thank you!

@gmaurice Invalid Security Token is the key indicator here:

Find the host(s) and go to them within the UI and click the button for “Reset Encryption Data” then you may need to restart the machine(s) in question.

@rdr Both things should be fixed:

The “empty” Last checkin you saw was from the Legacy Client checkin time which itself is relatively new.

Added a specific Agent check in column.

Also should fix the issue with selector drop down updating on snapin update with a new file.

Please update and test.

Thank you!

@rdr 0.1.8 introduced rolling update patterns where 0.1.6/0.1.7 did not have them quite yet.

Thanks for letting me know about the reboot issue you were seeing and that the updates seemingly fixed.

You can unset your “desired version” on the hosts and configure your global settings:

FOG Configuration -> FOG Settings -> FOG Agent.

FOG_AGENT_DESIRED_VERSION is now meant to be a “Pinned” update version so you can maintain (in fleet, or per host - per host winning of course) what versions your environment is using.

FOG_AGENT_UPDATE_MODE is a selector for Pinned, Latest, No update. By default it’s disabled just in case. Since the FOG Agent is still very new, this may be a good setting to ensure reporting and testing.

Documentation on all of this is on docs.fogproject.org.

https://docs.fogproject.org/en/latest/management/web/agent-self-update
https://docs.fogproject.org/en/latest/kb/reference/fog-agent-reference
https://docs.fogproject.org/en/latest/tags/agent

@scottrayr I’m not able to replicate the issue you’re seeing.

@rdr You found a real bug. Sysprep is not needed, and it would not have helped.

Cause: the image carries the agent’s key and certificate from MMF-LAB2-00.
The agent compared the machine’s SMBIOS identity with that key only when it
had no certificate. A deployed copy has one, so every PC connected as
MMF-LAB2-00 and took its name.

fog-agent 0.1.7, released today, makes the check on every start.

To fix the PCs you already deployed:

• Go to FOG Configuration > FOG Settings > General Settings and set
  FOG_AGENT_DESIRED_VERSION to 0.1.7. Every enrolled agent updates itself,
  including each PC that thinks it is MMF-LAB2-00.
• After the update, each PC sees that it is not MMF-LAB2-00, makes a new
  key, and enrolls as itself. FOG matches it to its host by MAC.
• If FOG deployed to that host in the last 24 hours, the enrollment is
  approved automatically. If not, approve it under Hosts > Pending Agents.
  The agent then renames the PC to its name in FOG.

Please post back whether the names come right.

@Balage80 Thanks for confirming the enrollment fix.

UEFI boot: I think the cause is two new lines in default.ipxe. They read Secure Boot state from the firmware. iPXE reads it by stepping through every firmware variable, and some firmware never ends that list, so iPXE hangs there.

Please test this: take the new 979-byte default.ipxe and delete only these two lines. Keep everything else.

param secureboot ${efi/SecureBoot}
param setupmode ${efi/SetupMode}

Does UEFI boot with that file? Please also post the make, model, and BIOS version of the machine. Note that re-running installfog.sh writes a new default.ipxe, which replaces a manual edit.

Pending MACs: these are not related to default.ipxe. They come from the legacy FOG Client’s Host Registration module. That module reports every adapter Windows sees, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and virtual Wi-Fi Direct adapters. FOG stores each unknown MAC as pending, up to FOG_QUICKREG_MAX_PENDING_MACS per host (default 4). iPXE cannot see those adapters. You can delete the pending MACs. To stop new ones, add MAC fragments to FOG_QUICKREG_PENDING_MAC_FILTER (comma separated), or turn off Host Registration.