I appreciate what you do for FOG. If you need VM space, you know you can give me a hollar.

There’s a copy of fog and fog-community-scripts stored in the arctic printed on film that will last over a thousand years.

I think that is simply awesome.

Primary: https://archiveprogram.github.com/

Others:

• https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/open-source/githubs-arctic-vault-makes-sure-open-source-code-survives-apocalypse
• https://hackaday.com/2020/07/29/ask-hackaday-why-did-github-ship-all-our-software-off-to-the-arctic/

@WalterT This post is completely unhelpful to yourself and to the fog community, and seems rash as well. If you need help with getting fog setup, create a thread about your specific problem, provide details, screenshots, logs, information. The community will help you as best as possible after you provide basic details about your specific issue.

Ok…

I’m feeling pretty ignorant at the moment.

I got to messing with this again and was able to try out a new unmanaged 1Gbps Cisco switch with it and I went through several different configurations in my tests and kept getting inconsistent results.

I have finally found out what the issue was. It was a bad patch cable the whole time.

That’s pretty shameful on my part as a technician, but it would be more shameful to conceal my mistake and not report what the issue was.

I do believe I exhausted every single other possible option before I realized it was the patch cable. Checking simple things first is hammered into all of us as troubleshooters, and the lesson has definitely been reinforced in me.

I come from Semantic Ghost background.

Fog is MUCH faster, supports queuing, renaming, joining to the domain, and there is ample support and high-responsiveness on the forums, with ample materials available in the wiki as well.

FOG images in general compress very well. 40GB compresses down usually to about 19GB on the server’s disk.

It’s free - not free like free beer, but free as in you may freely examine the code, freely make copies, freely make changes to your copies, freely distribute it under the GNU GPLv3 License, free to charge for it even, if you can (although I doubt you’d be successful)! The GNU GPLv3 allows for all of these things, as long as the License is respected and provided with copies and changes, and as long as all changes are completely open source and available to the public.

FOG can serve as a reliable DHCP server for you, offering more control and more options than Windows Server 2008 and below did (see our article on BIOS and UEFI Co-Existence).

FOG bridges the imaging gap for OSX, Linux, and Windows, and provides a management client for all three that can name them, join them to the domain, and run snapins on - all from a common web interface.

FOG can manage printers for you, allowing you to avoid cluttering up your domain controllers and group policy.

I use WOL to wake computers up on a schedule easily, and during breaks like spring break and winter break, I can easily disable it.

I use the fog client to push out Chrome updates regularly - with absolute ease. Using snapins also keeps group policy on computers and domain controllers less cluttered.

FOG logs logins for me, which I was previously logging using advanced scripting techniques that only I understood in my organization. Now, just using the web interface technicians can see login history for a computer or individual.

Fog supports wiping HDDs, and I can integrate ISOs into fog without much trouble.

Used to be, imaging a lab was a two to three person job for several hours with Ghost, and now it takes one single technician under 30 minutes - all of which are spent standing around and making sure things go smoothly. For example, we don’t have to name computers because fog does this. We don’t have to join to the domain because fog does this.

Please don’t disrespect CloneZilla in your report. Comparing it to FOG is unfair. It’s comparing apples to oranges. CloneZilla has strengths where FOG has weaknesses, and vice versa. For instance, if there are strict regulations on a network that a individual technician is not allowed to change, CloneZilla could be the winner in that scenario. If the network performs poorly, has problems, is slow, or non-existent, CloneZilla is the clear winner. If a technician does not have a server or old computer to dedicate as a FOG server, then CloneZilla is the winner. Also, CloneZilla is the most simple way to clone a FOG server! Where CloneZilla has weaknesses, FOG far excels. And where FOG excells is using your network to get work done - and fast. Bottom line is - CloneZilla is free open source software and has it’s place in the computer imaging industry and it should be respected for what it is.

@ITSolutions said in DNS Name Goes to Old FOG Installation:

Ubuntu moved the default location for web pages in 14.04 from /var/www to /var/www/html. FOG is designed to do a symlink back to /var/www, but maybe something broke in that.

I think that statement there is what’s going on.

So, if you use the host name, you are taken to 1.2.0 interface, but if you use the IP you are taken to fog trunk interface.

This means that the web files for 1.2.0 obviously still exist, and the trunk files are there too.

If it were me, I’d delete everything in /var/www EXCEPT for the html directory, and I would delete everything INSIDE of /var/www/html and re-run the installer. That should fix it.

So for instance if you saw some-folder inside /var/www you’d do rm -rf /var/www/some-folder That’s a recursive delete command. same goes for everything in the other.

You can list the contents of the directory, including hidden files, with ls -la

People that are new to fog don’t see the value in registering normally - and that’s OK. But fog comes to life with registered computers - automatic host naming, automatic domain joining, automated startups, shutdowns, reboots, software & script deployments, printer management, tracking of who logs into and out of said computers, inventory reports, imaging history, and many other things. Many of FOG’s features, you cannot use without registering.

And after you try out registering & using these features, you will start to understand how unnecessarily hard you were working before.

the WiKi SVN article somewhat promotes upgrading to the developmental revisions…

I really think that the other upgrading methods should be ditched, IMHO. But others here feel otherwise.

At the least, the Upgrade To Trunk article and the SVN article ought to be merged. I’ve thought about doing this, but the SVN portion would be huge compared to the others, and I just haven’t gave it much time nor thought.

And I’m not “In” enough to maintain the news section.

Sad truth is, although Tom is fuc**** awesome at what he does, he is largely a one-man-army and he has a full time job and wife and so on. He’s the driving force behind FOG.

JBob comes in 2nd, with massive improvements to the new FOG client.

The other developers aren’t active enough (IMHO) to be able to keep the news section updated.

And me,

I’m a forum troll, and I help people as I can, but I’m not “in” enough to keep it updated (IMHO).

I’m more than willing to try, but I may fall short sometimes…

Over the last few weeks, working with Tom, I was able to test changes back and forth over for Ubuntu 16 and Debian 8.

Both now install without modifications, without special commands.

Install Debian 8, just pull down fog and run the installer as normal. It works.

Install Ubuntu 16, just pull down fog and run the installer as normal. It works.

@Developers @Moderators @Testers

Just created this article:

https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/BIOS_and_UEFI_Co-Existence

@cyannella said in Fog for Dev - Save each capture in its own folder automatically.:

How do I launch rsync myself with the parameters after FOG captures the device image?

Research about FOG’s post download scripts. This should get you started: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/7740/the-magical-mystical-fog-post-download-script

You could also hook into web calls for when the image capture reports it is complete. Could do a one-liner exec statement in the php, and any number of more-fancy things.

Maybe the solution is simpler. maybe a clever bash script that runs within cron to do what you want with recent images. There is a DB with all the capture dates in it after all… python could do this too.

Reviving this thread on my lunch break. What would a docker container for FOG look like?

Immediate thoughts:

• specify via environment variables database configuration for some external DB.
• Specify via environment variables the other things found in /opt/fog/.fogsettings too.
• disk mounting for images.

For the VM image, I could probably get this going in a couple weekends. In my VM environment at home, I can create qcow2 disk types. Though I can convert qcow2 to vmdk rather easily. Could make a qcow2 as well as vmdk torrents individually for distribution.

The number keeps going up, we’re at 233 dev users now.

I’ve added some more steps that should avoid those errors.

I’ve updated the chown command in the wiki. The user fogproject is something that came about after this article was written. The user used to be just fog

@george1421 said in Fedora 33 and Ubuntu 16:

I think there is surely a value in creating a supported operating system list for the FOG project.

Agreed. Though @Tom-Elliott wants to get everything OS agnostic by replacing PHP components with NodeJS ones, getting the UI and API away from making native OS calls, so on.

It’s a good plan, but a ton of work and probably years away. In the mean time, we could limit scope of the installer script by choosing a handful of OSs.

I’m having a lot of problems integrating Fedora 33 into the daily tests. This has been the reason for the lapse in testing here this last month.

I use Debian 10 as a bastion host, and use SSH Proxy Jump through Debian 10 to get to the other OSs. This has worked with every other OS that I’ve added. The Terraform configuration for Fedora 33 is here.

It’s not working for Fedora 33. I’ve gone over this issue probably a dozen times. Manual tests of this functionality work fine, so I’m unable to reproduce the problem. At this point, I need to leave Fedora 33 behind as there is value being lost in not testing the other more-popular OSs.

Good news is I’ve added Ubuntu 16 to the daily tests. This is because it’s still quite popular among dev-branch users.

Ubuntu 16.04 End-Of-Life is April 30, 2021. I suggest on this date the FOG Project drop support for Ubuntu 16.04 entirely. I urge the community currently using Ubuntu 16.04 to move to something newer.

I’m also down with making a Ubuntu image. Since that seems to be most popular. I wouldn’t want to mess with more than one.

A docker container is a good idea.

I was thinking with a VM image using Debian, I could pull down the packages FOG needs locally, and set apt-get to use those local packages. All the packages would also be pre-installed in the image.

As far as running something first-boot, if I’m building it I wouldn’t set it up like that. I’d say the admin can log into the VM (however they do that), and just run the fog installer which would already be there for them.

With this approach, there’s no changes to the installer or the code base. I hoped to automate building this image, creating a new one with each FOG release, and distributing via torrent.

If admins want to update, they would need internet and comment/uncomment some lines in their sources.list file, and update the fog repo with git pull.

Because the OS would be a chosen one, I can write up some documentation on setting a static IP, as well as putting a readme in the image saying the same.

Though a docker image is good too. idk if it would be easier or not. I don’t know docker very well.

It is probably really wasteful for nothing more than a FOG server, but you can mirror RPM repos really easily and host them locally for systems to access. I’ve done this before. I can say I had more problem’s with RHEL’s repos than any other. Sometimes packages there would simply be missing. Never had this issue with CentOS or Ubuntu repositories (which I’ve also mirrored and hosted locally).

Yeah, at this point Fedora would be a better pick for RPM based Linux than CentOS.

I think people should learn Debian. It’s not that big of a jump. The more you know about Linux, the less the distro matters. Tons of stuff online about Debian that you can search for any need you have. Main difference is apt-get vs dnf vs yum.

How to install git on CentOS:
yum -y install git

How to install git on Debian:
apt-get -y install git

So much difference…

The community likes Ubuntu a lot. I’m assuming most of these are probably from Europe, as Linux is popular there and there’s a decent FOG following in Europe. I would not choose Ubuntu for a server OS simply because of the automatic update stuff it does by default. At every company I’ve ever worked at, patches are a very, very controlled event. Down to the day, when it starts, when it ends, what’s being applied. We’d never put a server on cruise control.

Back to topic: An appliance based on Debian is a good idea. The build process should be automated, I can help with this. I have a decent internet connection at my house. I can distribute the image as a torrent (wouldn’t be very big). Others can help host if they choose due to the nature of the torrent system.