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

@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

@bacelo

In case it helps clarify things - I’ll explain briefly how the network booting process works with FOG.

A DHCP service runs on some machine somewhere.

A host turns on… (This host is on the same network that DHCP is running on.)

Discovery
The host broadcasts to the network “Hey, I need an address.”

Offer
The DHCP service hears the broadcast, and then broadcast’s back “Here use this address and these options…”

Momentary pause
The host & server momentarily listen on the network for any objections from other hosts (a host with the same IP will broadcast “No you can’t use that, I already have it!”)

Request
The host then responds to the DHCP server with yet another broadcast and says “Ok, I want this address”.

Acknowledge
The server hears that and then responds with a broadcast saying “OK, you’ve got it, I’ve made note.”

So now… the HOST has an IP and configuration for that IP. The configuration (in FOG’s scenario) also contains DHCP Options 066 and 067. 66 is the “Next-Server” and 67 is the “Boot-file”. These options are sent out in the DHCP Offer (above).

The host will then ask the Next-Server for the Boot-File using TFTP.

The TFTP Server (usually the FOG server) will respond with the requested file.

And then other things begin happening… but you’re not getting even this far - you’re host isn’t getting an address from the FOG server, it’s getting an address from another DHCP server elsewhere - and THAT DHCP server is not configured correctly to hand out options 066 and 067.

Now then…

Hopefully you can see how having two DHCP Services on a network with one not configured will simply not work 100% of the time (and maybe none of the time). This is what @george1421 and @Sebastian-Roth were talking about. If there is a pre-existing DHCP Service running on the network, you need to edit that. We happen to have a full guide written just for doing this: https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/Modifying_existing_DHCP_server_to_work_with_FOG

So maybe set the default to InnoDB, and we think further on how existing installs can get onto InnoDB?

Is there any reasons why InnoDB isn’t the default database engine? @george1421 says it performs better.

@Arrowtron In addition to increasing your fog client checking time as was suggested by @Sebastian-Roth, and in addition to moving the database to InnoDB as suggested by @george1421 I’d recommend you go to 4 CPU cores.

Additional information about FOG passwords for future readers: https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Password_Central

I’ve looked over all of the posts in this particular topic. Perhaps I’ve missed it, but I don’t see FOG Server specs. How many cores? Core speed? Type of disk, like SAS2 or SAS3, SATA3, etc. Disk speed? Disk spinner or solid state? Amount of RAM? Size of Swap Space? Is this server a dedicated server? These things are important to know.

I think he’s talking about the disk wipe feature.

@Fog_Newb Send me your email address in a direct message (it’s the talk bubble in the top right), and I’ll get a wiki user created for you.

@astrugatch Ah good one. I see that @Sebastian-Roth has already updated the article. Thank you Sebastian for your speediness and pro-activeness, as always.

It’s working now for me.

Firefox hard refresh is Ctrl + F5. Still the same issues for me unfortunately.