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/

@Infojoe Unfortunately my test environment where I would normally work on these things hasn’t been behaving nicely.

Luckily, however, a fellow developer @rodluz was able to narrow the “what” and I believe I have fixed it.

The issue at least based on what was found:

PHP 8.1 deprecated the FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING feature and I replaced it with FILTER_SANITIZE_SPECIAL_CHARS or something alike to it.

This was the expected change at the time, but forgot that special characters may show up in Session variables (among other variables)

So say an & would get created, well FILTER_SANITIZE_SPECIAL_CHARS would encode & to & which would then see the & again and perform the same trick over and over and over in a recursive loop.

This is what was causing the CPU spikes, my apologies for that oversite. This has been addressed within the latest dev-branch if anyone would like to kick the tires?

Thank you!

Is everyone having this particular problem consistently using the LDAP plugin by chance?

@rogalskij I don’t know OS:

PHP error logs
/var/log/php-fpm/www-error.log (redhat based)
/var/log/apache2/error.log (debian based)

SQL:
SELECT * FROM history;

I doubt the sql will be of much help, but anything is better than nothing.

Most of the logs I’ve gotten this far don’t appear to have anything and maybe none of them do, in which case I don’t know when the issue was directly introduced.

If anyone is able to bisect known good and the obvious current as the starting bad to figure out when it got introduced?

I’m assuming we’ve all tried reverting to the first known good and verified it is still “good” as well?

Basically if someone doens’t mind taking where they know they’re broken, and iterating back to when it works great to exactly when it fails, it may help us figure out where to start otherwise I’m currently flying blind.

@rogalskij The number in front of all hosts (and groups/snapins/images/etc…) is the Database ID of the object in question, that’s expected.

I’m trying to follow what caused this and I’m having a difficult time reproducing it.

Can you all edit /var/www/fog/lib/db/pdodb.class.php at line -> 125:

change:

PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES => false,

to:

PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES => true,

I’m pretty sure this is going to break other things, but it will give me a data point I’m trying to narrow down.

Can you get some output from /var/log/php-fpm/www-error.log (if redhat based?) or /var/log/apache2/error.log (if debian)

Basically try to load the page, and tail the log and return that output here for htat rough timestamp.

Also see if there’s anything in the history table:

SELECT * from fog.history;

For around that time frame.

@olivier-bonnici How many hosts do you have?

@tatanas @Infojoe as well, apologies on delayed response.

@JGeear I don’t know who changed what or when or why.

You can look at the history table to get a guess as to when it might have happened, but I don’t believe it’s as direct an audit of what changed specifically, just that the Storage node was updated.

@mashina I have made an update after being able to replicate the problem you described.

Issue it seems was an error 500 occuring on line 329 of the taskingelement.class.php element because it couldn’t find a relevant imaging log.

I’ve added code that seems to be able to address this though not sure what is actually wrong otherwise. WIth the patch I made things seem to complete okay so I think it’d work good for uni and multicast tasks if you’d be willing to update and test?

@mashina Okay so just so I fully understand:

The database is successfully updating, but for some reason it’s not returning the exit code correctly.

I don’t know why (I do want to fix the error you’re seeing but it doesn’t appear to be causing a true “problem” just causes the machine to appear like there is a problem when after the reboot actually occurs), however all is perfectly fine just it might take a minute or 2 longer to actually get into a bootable/workable system?

So your issue is not at all related though the messaging is similar (Failed to update database) but its failing because it believes the task no longer exists (which indeed is true although only in the context that it is successfully completing the task, but not sending the expected code FOS is waiting for.)

(I know I’m seeming to ramble, just trying to get my thoughts out and help steer the issue toward whats actually wrong so we know where to look to hopefully fix it.)

The database is updated, but because FOS doesn’t get the code it expects, it thinks it needs to retry. The retry has nothing to associate to any more (Hence the no active task.)