[fog] FOG 0.30 Released!

[Cools]

never had a problem 6 gb image deploys in 8 min and i just did a update from 0.29 to 0.30.. never notice a speed decrease...

[Chad]

Any chance of enlightening me on this a bit more, we too are experiencing very slow image deployment, that's if it starts at all.

 

Where about was the file you replaced? (running on a ubuntu server.)

 

John

 

Hi John,

 

I'm on Ubuntu too:

 

Look in /tftpboot/fog/images/ and you'll see a file called init.gz

 

rename this to something else: (these commands assume you have appropriate access rights)

 

mv /tftpboot/fog/images/init.gz /tftpboot/fog/images/init030.gz

 

Then copy in the init.gz from your 0.29 version. If you still have the 0.29 archive decompressed on your Ubuntu box it'll probably be in your opt/fog-setup directory:

 

cp /opt/fog-setup/fog_0.29/packages/tftp/fog/images/init.gz /tftpboot/fog/images/

 

After I did this I got my download speed back. I didn't bother downgrading the kernel as it seems OK with the 0.30 one (though it's quite verbose in spurious error messages which can seemingly be ignored). The only downside is slower upload speeds again, but I'd sooner have quicker downloads as we do far more of those!

 

HTH,

 

Chad

[Chad]

never had a problem 6 gb image deploys in 8 min and i just did a update from 0.29 to 0.30.. never notice a speed decrease...

 

What speed NICs do you have, Cools?

 

I'm pulling down 6Gb in under 2 mins on Lenovos, same image takes about 5min on Dell GX520s (all 1Gb NICs). With the 0.30 upgrade, these became something like 8min and one model (I forget which) went to nearer 40mins

 

Chad

[Cools]

there 1 gb nics.. but the pc's are clapped out and 5 yrs old, there old Acer Power M8 with some strange nic..

 

the new hp dc7900 have 15 gig images and take 20min..

[Chad]

What OS are you running FOG on? I wonder if the slow speed with 0.30 is distro related...

[Cools]

hmmm

 

root@fog:~# cat /etc/lsb-release

DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu

DISTRIB_RELEASE=9.04

DISTRIB_CODENAME=jaunty

DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 9.04"

[Chad]

DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu

DISTRIB_RELEASE=10.10

DISTRIB_CODENAME=maverick

DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 10.10"

 

I should have stayed with the LTS server edition I think.

[morganw]

I wouldn't have the through the distribution you are using will make a difference, especially as you are getting massively varying speeds between computer models. Once it's going it's the client side that does all of the work, the server is just offering the images with NFS. Try setting an older kernel on a per host basis for the computers that are now taking 40 minutes to image.

[Chad]

Morganw,

 

As per previous messages I've already rolled back the init.gz to the 0.29 version and am still using the FOG 0.30 kernel. It's the new busybox init.gz which causes the speed issues - the 0.29 version is much faster. But the speed problem doesn't seem to affect all users...

[morganw]

Out of interest what are the CPU types on the computers that imaged slowly?

[Chad]

The 40min one I had was a core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3.00GHz in a new out of the box HP DC8000. Even the aging old GX520s were only taking 8 mins or so!

 

My first thought was the kernel too, seeing as it provides the NIC driver, but I'd already been using the 0.30 kernel on FOG 0.29 prior to upgrading and it was the fastest combination I'd used thus far.

 

I had a quick scan through the fog script in the init.gz and the only changes I could really see related to using parallel gzip client side when uploading - the download stuff looks unchanged. Strange... and odd that other folk have seen no such issues - but as you say, that could be down to client side CPUs.

[morganw]

As a test if you disabled the onboard network card, then stuck in a network card from an older PC, I wonder if that would make a difference? If that works it would eliminate an issue with the CPU.

I'm still on 0.29 and when I saw that 0.30 didn't have any fixes for the services on Windows 7, or the fsarchiver option, I decided to let the dust settle on this one.

[Cools]

i have a rook of AMD Sip 3200+ and a room of Intel Core2Duo 2.3MHz

And there both rooms are slow..

 

Well... Slow to what some people are getting. i was thinking of disabling the compression on the kernel.. That will speed it up, just have to make a new img.. But the img size will be 6.8gb not 3.5gb

 

Have you lot got hibernate disable so you done have a big hibernation file and have the page file set to delete on shutdown. That will save some space..

[Chad]

I've worked around the issue by making the following changes:

 

Create an entry in the SQL table globalsettings called FOG_PXE_BOOT_IMAGE_UPLOAD , setting category "TFTP Server". this will now appear on the FOG Settings page. I gave it the value fog/images/init030.gz - after having copied the init.gz from the 0.30 release to /tftpboot/fog/images/ with this name.

 

Note I have the init.gz from 0.29 as the "default" init.gz file in this folder.

 

Then in /var/www/fog/commons I edited functions.include.php and found where it creates a PXE upload job. Instead of getting the init.gz filename from FOG_PXE_BOOT_IMAGE I told it to use FOG_PXE_BOOT_IMAGE_UPLOAD

 

This results in uploads using the init.gz from 0.30, and downloads still use the init.gz from 0.29.

 

Result: Downloads are nice and fast using the 0.29 init.gz and 0.30 kernel, and uploads are nice and fast using pigz and the 0.30 kernel.

 

Hacky, but it works - and until the download speed issues with the 0.30 init.gz are resolved it'll do for me.

 

Cheers,

 

Chad

Edited March 8, 2011 by Chad

[Chiddo]

Hey Everyone,

I just wanted to say thanks for the pointers on replacing init.gz with the older distro from 0.29. I consistently had any client image uploads fail/hang at ~10 seconds with the 0.31 FOG release. Clients were Dell OptiPlex 745, Gateway E2300, Dell D605 laptops and Dell Precision T3500's. All of them ran the test's and other functions of the netboot just fine, but would all crash/hang at about 8-10 seconds in to the upload process regardless of the image type selected. Once I replaced init.gz with the 0.29 this was resolved. As far as I am concnerend slower speed is better than no speed .

 

The FOG install is 0.31 on a fresh Ubuntu 10.04LTS 64bit (Patched as of 6/20/11) Provisioned with 512MB RAM. This is running in a VMware ESXi 4.1u1 install on a custom built system with specs shown in the image bellow.

 

 

If you have suggestions for optimization let me know... I am new to FOG and I have not really found any tips for running it in a VM such as do's and don'ts.

 

Thanks again for the useful info in this post. It made the difference in a usable solution.

-Chiddo

[JJonas]

Having a problem pushing images to clients using FOG 0.32, it keeps hanging, have changed the init.gz to the 0.29 version but this has not fixed the problem.

The same client images fine using our old FOG Server 0.29

Edited February 23, 2012 by JJonas

[morganw]

Have you tried using the older kernel as well?