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

@sebastian-roth Great job, the installation tests are looking beautiful today.

I would suggest sticking to the Ubuntu LTS versions for use with FOG. I test the latest LTS versions daily (results in my signature). It may be that this version of PHP isn’t available for Ubuntu 21.04. Also, to update FOG you really need to have internet access too.

@Sebastian-Roth working-1.6 has the same breakage.

The centos8 failure there is just a fluke. For some reason I’ve not figured out yet, centOS 8 and RHEL 8 are entirely unreliable to test within this automation I’ve built. I think it has something to do with SSH settings but not sure.

Same thing today. I’ll add working-1.6

I was able to get the installation tests working again last night. Looks like on the dev-branch, Ubuntu and Debian are having issues with MySQL and MariaDB. Seems too closely related to be a fluke. I will check tomorrow’s results and see if it’s the same.

http://fogtesting.theworkmans.us/

@sebastian-roth
Yes, and yes.

Look at that, Raspbian and Red Hat are in the list now. Also, 359 dev installations/upgrades since we started tracking.
Somewhere around 85 systems are very closely tracking the latest dev branch, with many others tracking a bit less closely.

@Tom-Elliott I took an easier route. The intent of your request was to see the exact values. So I added a JSON text object to the solution.

There is a link for downloading the current JSON data on the dashboard now. Though you can go directly to it using this link: https://fog-external-reporting-results.theworkmans.us/external_reporting.json

This is the PR that accomplished this if you were curious. https://github.com/FOGProject/fog-community-scripts/pull/70

@Tom-Elliott it’s likely possible to do.
The graphs use Python’s pyplot module. Here is the exact spot in the script for the OS Versions graph:
https://github.com/FOGProject/fog-community-scripts/blob/c527036bc4623f7f6225a48c545d37edc269d112/external_reporting/external_reporting/do_web_tasks.py#L88

I’ll see if I can add some numbers.

327 dev installations out there now, at least. Not a single one is Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Which, I suppose makes sense. If you’re paying to use RHEL, you’re probably in a business setting and wouldn’t install from a developer branch because you want something stable.

Also notably there are zero Arch dev systems out there since we started tracking. This is a bigger point as I can’t think of a reason why an Arch Linux user wouldn’t dive into fog dev branch.