Posts made by vascomorais

i’ll write a quick tutorial as soon as i have everything working. I guess i can’t use -no–describe in uefi, but i can allways use wimbot to boot to an envoirment and then mount iscsi devices and go from there.
memdisk is a nice kernel but loading the ENTIRE iso into the ram is network consuming and big isos will eat up my ram at best.
running from iscsi is the way to go! it’s like a physical device , but mounted virtually, via a network, it’s like using a pen, but -no-describe ruins some of the feautres i want to use, well… if i want to use it in uefi mode anyway.

@george1421 Hey George, thanks! i will take a look a it, but now i have one slight problem.
I tought everything was running perfectly, but it seems that the -no-description will actually destroy some of my , previously working stuff.
For instance, if i use no-description to boot a windows instalation boot disk , it will ask me to point out where are the drivers and files for the said instalation, this is because it seems that no-description will not mount the iscsi device as a san “drive” like it’s meant, with drive letters and blocks and etc…

if i use no-description with ipxe.efi it will not work.

is there any other efi bootable file i can try?
cheers

okay i got everything working now, but i had to use --no-describe

so here’s my parameters for ipxe boot menu:

sanboot --no-describe iscsi:192.168.0.6::::iqn.2000-01.com.synology:SrSynology.Target-2.43ae68fcff

boots perfectly on bios and legacy.

Now… is there a way i can hide menu items depending on if they are booting from legacy or uefi it would be awsome as some of my isos have both efi and bios boot and others only have either efi or bios

okay, i still have a weird problem, but this time i think it’s a bug.
after finding the ipxe.efi file instead of both 32 and 64, i managed to boot to fog ipxe menu (same as legacy) but the sanboot comands don’t work in the menu, if i try to use them and then press “s” for the ipxe shell, and type them manually, they work, but if i try to use the script in the fog configuration menu , it will just fail, altough the script works fine in legacy boot mode.

is this a bug or…

ah wait, i looked at the tftpboot folder and found out that i only have ipxe.efi file, not 32 and 64 like on ipxe documentation, is this normal? i pointed both 32 and 64 on my dhcp to this kernel. i did good?

hey guys, i got my system setup perfecly with legacy, but i can’t boot it in efi networks, the system wouldn’t even show up.
I have added ipxe32 and 64 on my pfsense dhcp server options but it didn’t do anything.
What am i doing wrong?
many thanks

Nevermind, i went to ipxe and saw how sanboot works.
So here’s what i found out:

101 tutorials later, the simpliest way to get Fog to work as a IT Tools and OS’s deployment system is indeed with an iscsi device.

So here’s what i did:

Step1: Get a Synology or an Xpenology
Step2: Create iScsi drive
Step3: Mount the iScsi drive in your favourite OS and Clone / Install whatever you want it there, treat it as you were installing stuff on a drive you would like to have it bootable, in my case, i had a physical hard drive full of tools , windows installs, and even a partition with an instalation of windows so i can test everything out.
Step4: After creating your Hard Drive just use Fog Project menu to say : Hey IPXE boot into this San device please.
In my case i just added: sanboot iscsi:192.168.0.6::::iqn.2000-01.com.synology:SrSynology.Target-1.43ae68fcff , i’ll leave this one here but this one is leading into my xpenology, you will need to modify yours.
Step3.5: i forgot you should enable multiple clients to access your drives, you can also make them read only if they are windows instalations or hiren’s boot or something, it works with everything and you don’t need to use the dreadful memdisk kernel that only works half o the time and it uses a bunch of unecessary ram.

Anyway, many thanks to this comunity you guys were great , for now, i’m setup.

A special thanks to George who was extremely helpful , it’s guys like you who make the internet awsome

Hello everyone, i have an iscsi device in my network that just happens to be a bootable disk with lots of utitlies, windows instalation setups and even a test OS.
I used SanDeploy to test if it would work in the real world aplication and it worked perfectly, i also used ccboot another diskless system to boot from a vm disk and altought slow as hell, it also booted fine.

My question here is:

how possible is to get Fog to boot from either cases? (An iScsi drive, or a Disk image (non iso))

@george1421 if you want i can send you some good isos, the best one is super boot cd it suports both uefi and legacy boots (it’s dual bootable actually) it’s huge (about 6 or 7gb) but it has everything a man can have.

@junkhacker unfortunatly i think that tutorial is wrong, that’s just unbuntu boot loader , hiren’s boot doesn’t even use that. it uses grub for the main menu and it starts from there…
loading the hiren’s iso with memdisk option is also a bad idea, the iso is almost 4GB, and it crashes due to that, memdisk loads fine with smaller isos, like hdclone iso (40 or so megs), it’s a cheap and easy way to get this working.
I think i’m starting to understand how fog project works, what i need right now, is to extend / create my drive so i can fill it with more stuff as my “home” folder was created with only 20gigs in mind and the images (the deployment per say where fog really shines) is something i don’t really use here at all…

did i said anything wrong? correct me please, i’m still getting the hang of it

@junkhacker ahh… so, in that advanced menu i can just add lines for each “boot menu item” right?
@george1421 not complaining, i bet fog will be more than an handful for me.
I took a peak at serva, but i didn’t wanted to use a windows vm and running serva, i would allways prefer to use a dedicated light os server like centos and installing the fog server on top to simplify things up.
Like i said everything has a learning curve, and i don’t have any experience with pxe or dhcp booting .

Anyway you guys are awsome for trying to help me out, i bet once i figure out how to do something i will eventually get into fog deeper and deeper until i can start helping others myself.

@tom-elliott hey tom, thanks for helping me.
Where’s the advance menu configation? i am using fog 1.5.4 and all the tutorials are for 1.2 or below. and the menus are in different places etc…
if you have a pre configured fog with isos and cloning tools etc… that i can try on my vm i could see those examples and adapt acordingly.
otherwise i’m stuck reading and i am completly lost, fog is not very intuitive, but i guess everything has a learning curve

the black screen says: no default or ui configuration directive found

Hello everyone, so i have been sucessful at installing fog, and configuring all the server aspects, i now have a pxe server booting.

I was trying to follow this tutorial to get an iso of hirens boon running on pxe:
https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/7318/adding-hirens-15-2-boot-cd-to-the-boot-menu/30

i think i have made everything correctly altough the last part : adding menu in fog web gui , it doesn’t say where i should put those lines, but i supose it were in the “parameters” field.
Anyway the menu shows up, and it starts loading the iso (the entire iso) to a ram disk… in order for it to run.
after that it quits to a shell where it says “boot”
Probably waiting for a boot kernel or something?
Anyway is there anyway possible to load the iso in increments instead of the whole thing?
And secondly (and most important) what did i do wrong?

Cheers

well… got pfsense and fog already is booting into his pxe menu. Thanks!
I am now reading the rest of the tutorials you mentioned so i can get ahead and configure this awsome server.
many thanks George!

uhhh, nice, i have been configuring pfsense to replace my router, but i am stuck with a weird issue.

• non related fog project stuff here –

begin
After configuring all the corresponding vlans for GPON, IPTV and VOIP, i get an ip that doesn’t lead to the internet, and i don’t know why, usualy vodafone ip’s start with 89. something, i was getting an ip starting with 47.
The weirdest thing is that i couldn’t ping any dns’s or i couldn’t ping my own ip on the internet (using another internet connection) but i could ping my own ip, and if i moved my address 1 number forward or backward i could ping them as well…
it was as if my internet connectiong was accepted into a limbo pit of some sort, the worst part is that vodafone doesn’t provide tech support for anything that doesn’t use their own stuff…
So my second option was to use my router and connect it to the pfsense wan port, and have a router on top of a router… and use the second’s dhcp service…
Not good
end.

Anyway your method is interesting, and it would solve me a lot of problems.
is there a way i could reach my pxe boot from the exterior?

Hello, i am installing FOG for the very first time, i had chosen centos at the begining, but i then watched a tutorial online and he used kubuntu, so i am now using that to install fog.

Since i have a DHCP server that is provided by my router, i chose fog server not to use it’s DHCP server, but when i install it says that i should enable option 66 or 67 and forward it to my fog server ip address etc etc…
The thing is… i don’t have that option on my router, and i am not using a dhcp server on linux or windows.

I am stuck, what should i do? creating a firewall with pfsence is allways an option, but i am trying to figure out how people would do this with a simple modem/router

@george1421 i see… if i have an issue i could use the foruns and ask for help
okay. going to make a centos vm (basic instalation) and fog instalation. should be easy…

thanks, i looked at the first link and found some examples on how to install the isos on fog in order to make them bootable via pxe, following those examples i can virtually boot from any other iso right?

Hello, sorry for the lazy post , i could’ve just read everything nicely and calmly but with only sundays as the only free day, projects tend to be acomplished in such short time that i don’t even have time to read documentations.

Anyway here’s my question that it should be easy for anyone with FOG experience to answer.

I have ESXI installed on a server and running Vm’s, i want to use a PXE deployment system in order for people in a building to access my “isos” and “tools” as well as coloning Harddrives into “images” so they can restore them later (ex. when they want to switch from HDD to SSD, but don’t want to lose their data).

The isos include not only Windows in various versions, but also hiren’s boot for some technical data, and the more advanced, Super boot CD. the Super Boot CD contains two boots, one bios boot (legacy) and one uefi boot, so it’s like having two seperate boot cd’s into one.

I have a Synology (xpenology) installed on my system if it helps.

Also i have several ASD’s (Apple System Diagnostics) that i want to use in netboot (apple’s aproach to pxe , sort of…) is FOG capable of doing this as well? or do i have to use deploystudio ?

Many thanks in advance and sorry for the lazy thread.