Best posts made by Tom Elliott

@loosus456 My base images with all software had a disk usage of 48gb at it’s largest, but that was EVERYTHING I could put on. My “average” was about 25gb.

First, I’ll try to break down my thoughts on things just so you understand what fog IS vs. what it’s “aim” to replace things are.

FOG derived from a more affordable and faster medium compared to Ghost back in the day’s when it essentially ruled the roost. While there were alternatives to Ghost back in 2007 such as PING (Ping Is Not Ghost) and utilities that helped perform image capture, there wasn’t much of a simple means to perform the actions needed. This made imaging systems, useful, but almost everybody tied to using Ghost.

Chuck and Jian had a need for imaging systems but could no longer afford Ghost so they decided to write a tool to perform actions with a relatively simple interface. The initial release of FOG was intended to be more a “proof” of concept and was not expected to gain such a following (at least I don’t think it was).

FOG was created to Image systems using a simple interface. The idea of the interface was to be easily manageable without requiring the “admin’s” to get up out of their seats if possible. This is why FOG has a web based GUI vs some of the other more manually intense mechanisms.

It wasn’t until later on in the use of FOG by other people that FOG started becoming an Imaging Solution AND System Management solution.

To break it down, FOG is not a Virtualization system, nor is it a backup solution. It’s purpose in the realm of Information Technology is to allow you to create “clones” of one system and place those clones onto many other systems. These clones, while most still kind of use a Hardware Dependent setup, can be used on nearly any system you want. With the use of the FOG Client it can also be used to join systems to a domain, manage software installations or script operations through snapins, add/remove/manage printers, automate task actions, perform power management such as shutdown/reboot, wake systems up, and log users out. With the registration of systems, you can also maintain an inventory record of systems.

FOG’s intention is not to replace anything, but to be a more useful alternative to other imaging tools as possible.

This is the point of the ignore on client checkbox on the Mac addresses. Also, we’re working toward using system uuid to help identify a host to the dog system so hopefully Mac addresses would be a fallback, but not a requirement.

@wayne-workman and @george1421 this has been added for 1.6. I’m not going to try adding it to 1.5 as it is a bit of work to add the tests and the return information is at best rudimentary in 1.5.

I’ve added three elements:

Imaging Started
Imaging Completion
Imaging Duration

This should accomplish what you’re looking for.

The IP Address isn’t tracked in the Database anymore (since 0.29/0.30), so this isn’t something I’m adding.

The changes I made are within the working-1.6 and dev-branch branches within Github.

Thank you,

@jacoboren As @george1421 pointed out, then I think what you’re looking for already exists.

FOG Configuration Page->FOG Settings->Plugin Settings-> Enable Plugins.

Go to the gear icon that becomes present.

Click on “LDAP” plugin (Looks like a key).

Go to install plugin.

Click on “LDAP” plugin.

Click on Install LDAP Plugin.

You will then have a new icon appear that looks like the Key in the main menu item.

Click there.

Create New.

Make the configuration as you need it.

In your Storage Management Page, you have the images path for this node set to look at /fog, but the exports looks like it’s looking for /images. Which path are your images located in?

This is now resolved.

Apparently there was an issue in the codebase that wasn’t allowing the repository to be installed. I will likely need to figure out a more suitable fix in the installer itself.

All that’s needed is to run the installer. If there’s a problem, go to shell and run: (on ubuntu this is):

sudo apt-get update;sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Confirm the pops if they come up as their defaulted selected item.

Re-run the installer and all should work.

I may make a similar methodology as I do for giving the OU dropdowns a shot.

For those of you just tuning in, FOG, since 1.2.0 at least, has a pretty sweet option.

From FOG Configuration->FOG Settings->Active Directory Defaults you update your AD information which get’s pulled on a host when you click the checkbox or say yes during registration. This is pretty well known about. However, With the release of 1.2.0 (Maybe earlier even?) we added the ability to make the OU a dropdown box. Mostly this is for ease as having to type an OU is pretty confusing, especially if you have to do so on a per-host setup.

The way the OU currently can operate:

1. Text
   – This is simple text as FOG is already Known About
2. Select Box (Drop Down Selector)
   – This is how you can associate multiple OU’s for selection to other hosts.

We all know the original Text field, and this is still the case on the FOG Configuration Page. To make a dropdown:

1. Go to where FOG_AD_DEFAULT_OU is set.
2. Make a list of your OU’s you want to allow association with.
3. Create the Associations in the FOG_AD_DEFAULT_OU field.
4. Choose either host or group and set the desired OU based on the Drop down.

To create the dropdown, the OU field accepts two delimeters.

First delimeter is the | (Pipe) symbol. This is how you separate each OU. For example
test|test2||test3|test4

The above example would give a drop down that looks like:

The second delimeter is the ; (Semicolon) symbol. This is how you distinguish the default selected item. If I make the ou field set to:
test|test2|;|test3|test4
THe above example would give a dropdown that looks like:

It’s important to note that the ; and | goes after the field. You can place blank spots, and you, technically, can place multiple semicolons. However, the multiple semicolons may confuse things down the road.

A similar approach to this field could be adapted to domain, user, password fields as well.

@NT_Tech Access control is a plugin now which has much more use than the “mobile” vs “non-mobile” account.

FOG was indeed a single user system, from it’s original startup. The only thing that kind of made things different was the mobile interface.

I want you to understand, mobile interface was it’s OWN element from the main interface. This meant having to update two GUI platforms to ensure all functionality was maintained. When moved to a single interface that could do both mobile and full screen usages, I removed the “mobile only” user type.

I want to stress, while it wasn’t necessarily intuitive, even in 0.32 a “mobile only” user had exactly the same level of usage as the full admin users. The GUI access was limited and didn’t allow a mobile only user to see anything, but a mobile user could delete items, change things, etc… if they knew the url pathing and calls. They couldn’t see it, but it was not “limited” in the way you thought it was. As the access control plugin was created and managing a single interface made updating and keeping things in a more testable and common way, I decided to remove the “mobile only” option. This was not intended to hurt people who were using the element, but rather there were better things in place that did far better at controlling the scope of things and in a more granular and appropriate fashion.

@ch3i I think he wants to wipe the disk directly before fog deploys the image, but within the deploy task itself.

Init’s have been uploaded. Please re-run your installer. That should be all.

–max-bitrate is not set and udp-sender auto selects the speed.

@Sebastian-Roth LDAP used to store the bind password in encrypted form, similar to how we stored the ad default password in encrypted form. So there’s some back end work to verify if the password is in an encrypted form and if so, to decrypt it and pass it along. Otherwise just use the base text.

@Nika I don’t have predownload/preupload scripts built in, but I believe why @ch3i is confused is because you’re going to be overwriting the data after wiping the disk, which will do the same thing. Wiping the disk just adds extra time in the end that is more or less unneeded.

Group reset encryption data added.

SVN 3734 released to make the AD OU field in FOG Settings a text area.

Sorry I didn’t think it all the way through before.

I’ve seen this request but not quite sure how to move forward.

Please understand, Access controls, with this iteration of FOG Server, are coded after the fact.

What do I mean by this?

FOG didn’t really have any real security controls in place. You, indeed, needed to be logged in to do actions of course, but there weren’t any utilities in place for “modifying” access.

For a period of time, there was a thing called “mobile” user which basically just allowed a user to use a mobile interface. This interface was coded along side the FOG system, and was a cumbersome tool to maintain. So when we moved to a responsive design, I removed that “mobile” gui as the new GUI is also mobile accessible.

The Access control plugin is a huge leap toward getting a tool available to limit access based on rules/roles etc…, but it’s not a perfect system as it relies on the User existing in the database first.

I’m sure we could work to add a utility to enable a “default” role association but right now it doesn’t exist.

The idea of FOG Torrent was to download the image via torrent, and the more that had to do the task, the more you had to seed the image around.

This actually works pretty well, but it also means you must create a location to download the image first. This means it would ONLY work for resizable images and you had to make some pretty weird guestimates.

I accidentally broke it (although for good reason) by switching the filenames around from the resizable rec/sys .img formats to use the common filenames now of d1p1 and whatnot.

I’m not overly concerned about removing it and it was really just an idea that started to spin a wheel down the road, but hasn’t really gotten much traction as you can see.

4804 Fixes this thanks for reporting.