At work now, more updates installed on my exemplar laptop.
Uploaded fine, Image is now 5GB in size.
download is running at 256MB/M but seems to be stuttering (downloading a piece and then haulting etc)
The time elapsed and remaining is also stuttering and not moving smoothly.
just under 2 hours it’s estimating for download to see if the image works.
they are gigabit. other images download at full speed on those same machines.
current thinking is it might be the decompression holding things up…
going in tomorrow to try and get things working.
nice, hopefully the rest of your network has somewhere you can plug the bonded ports into from the switch.
I’ve seen many post on the forums advising against 14.04
I recommend Debian 7
you need to specify the boot server and file name in your DHCP. it only allows one in my DHCP options.
but you might be able to get something that gives a specific machine a different server and filename with a DHCP reservation.
either that or you could try and hack one to transfer over to the other and then boot to the HDD, but that would likely require a lot of programming and if you had those abilities you would probably have done that already.
If your imaging a few hundred a week… maybe it’s worth going for something that can push more than 1GbE.
If you have 10GbE networking between your switches then you could bond together a few gigabit NICs to throw even more data at once down the pipe. You will need a good storage system that can handle throwing multiple streams at once at full speed.
Also consider storage nodes… If you have multiple buildings/larger IDFs then maybe a storage node within one of these could help you image more quickly.
The big advantage of VMs is you can move them to new hardware as required and fit many VMs on one host.
As for Raid… Raid 5/6 has less performance than Raid 10 and you might need the extra performance depending on what specification you settle on.
I only have 1 physical fog left. virtual machines are great 
if your set on physical get good NICs/HDDs
you wont need much power but you do need to be able to throw data around.
it might help if you posted some info about your image size or how many PCs your imaging, and how often.
I’ve encountered a strange issue today…
I’m making a new windows image, (windows 7 64bit) and I’ve just uploaded it so that I can begin testing it on my other machines to make sure there are no problems…
However when I try to download it, it only goes at about 200MB/min
It was fine upon uploading and I’ve watched it get through the entire process, The image is about 24gb of data on HDD, Windows + Office, which seems to compress down to about 4.3GB.
I uploaded twice as I thought this was strange. I’ve not had time to let it get to the end of the download to see if it it working properly… can do that when I’m next onsite.
I suspected a problem with the network or the fog server, so checked for high CPU/RAM usage and for lack of disk space. no problems there.
I also tested another image I have, the normal one I’ve been deploying for a very long time and it downloads on the same machine at over 5GB/min.
So the only thing I am left with is the image itself causing problems… but since it’s just data I don’t see how it could make that much difference.
It does image way beyond the 6GB mark (I stopped it there wondering why it had not finished to troubleshoot) so I’m leaning away from the compression being dead…
Uploading machine is a Toshiba Satellite Pro (i3, 4GB RAM, SATA HDD), downloading machines are two dell vostros that I’ve tried (i3, 4GB RAM, SATA HDD) fog server is an older dual core that has been stable for a long time and still throws out the other images at fast speed. Fog is still on 0.32. 1.2 upgrade is scheduled but not until a storage upgrade goes in on my shared VM storage.
Anyone ever seen this?
mount the hard drive in that folder.
I wouldn’t use a USB drive for that purpose in my networks. Either local raid or iSCSI to NAS
I have a fog server on a two disk mirror (raid 1) I setup the raid when I installed Ubuntu.
That way you get the OS on raid as well as images and you don’t need to mess around too much with where to mount things.
Also, I mainly use Debian 7 for my FOG server nowadays.
You want the end users to be doing the imaging or your tech staff? I find it is quite easy to go into the menu on the pc after it has pxe booted and select quickimage.
it is also easy to do it from the web GUI and have the end user reboot it or turn it on. (most are capable of that action)
possibly use a non resizable image that will fit on every machine and then have a snapin or script that expands the drives using batch file or set the option in your sysprep.
Your running Fog 1.2 on Ubuntu 10.04?
possibly if you are running 0.32, you could consider upgrading OS (I use Debian 7) and fog at the same time on a new host/VM so you can get the advatages of all the updates.
I didn’t mean to imply that there was no help here, but that VMware or Ubuntu forums may give you more luck considering fog is only the software you’ve installed on Ubuntu inside your VMware VM. Fog does not change the file system or the VM so it’s basically all stock Ubuntu and VMware hypervisor.
an idea might be to make a new VM and shove the data into it so that the VM only expands as far as you need at the moment… however that is a lot of work and probably not what you want.
I have never used VMware fusion, I stick with Virtualbox/ESXi/XenServer, so I can’t help with that other than to direct you to their support channels.
I run my fog server on a VM, but I’m very careful with my storage, and my server has quite a bit more storage than your mac. It is supported but if I wanted to do something to the VM I would be more likely to get help off XenServer (my main hypervisor) than here.
you should not need any automated logins for FOG. As long as the NIC works and has drivers you should be fine all the way to joining the domain.
then you have an issue you need to take up with Ubuntu or VMware. I don’t know how to help you with that. I’ve not had to run my FOG server on storage that was overprovisioned, and I’m very careful not to overprovision as it can cause problems.
Have you tried Ubuntu or VMware support sites?
people work in different ways. we also have BTsync for distributing changes. each to his own.
Since tom and the other main developers are working with their current solution, probably best they keep going until they see a need to change.
also, fog prep is now no longer required iirc
is your server SSD as well?
the interesting bit would be imaging from a server with an SSD to allow multiple images to get to multiple clients from different parts of the disk at the same time.
your client CPUs low end? decompression is usually quite easy for CPUs to do fast. (faster than gigabit anyway)
have you looked at how much space you lose from doing that change?