The Tech Journal

10ZiG Manager – Deploy Configuration Template to 10ZiG Zero Client(s)

10ZiG, End User Computing, VDI, Zero Clients/Thin Clients 4 Responses »

May 062019

You’ve created some 10ZiG Manager configuration templates, modified them to reflect the settings you need, and now you want to deploy the configuration template to your 10ZiG Zero Clients using the 10ZiG Manager.

In this post, we’ll be going over how to deploy an existing configuration template that is stored inside of your 10ZiG Manager management software.

This allows you to push out configs on the fly to either a single device, or 10,000 devices at once. This is a MUST for managing small, medium, and large sized 10ZiG deployments.

If you’re interesting in 10ZiG products and looking to buy, don’t hesitate to reach out to me for information and/or a quote! We can configure and sell 10ZiG Zero Clients (and thin clients), help with solution design and deployment, and provide consulting services! We sell and ship to Canada and the USA!

This post is part three of a three part 10ZiG Manager Tutorial series:

Please Note: we are going to assume you have created a configuration template, have modified it to the settings you required, and have your network properly configured for 10ZiG Manager to function.

Instructions

Open the 10ZiG Manager.
Choose the 10ZiG Zero Client(s) that you’d like to deploy the configuration to. You can “CTRL + Click” or “SHIFT + Click” to select more than one 10ZiG Zero Client.
In the menu, expand “Configuration” -> and select “Apply Template”.
A “Configuration Template Note” is displayed. Please read and understand this, then click “Ok”.
In the “Configuration Templates” window, select and highlight the configuration template you’d like to deploy, and then click “Ok”. In my example, I’m choosing “DA-MainTemplate”.
The “Configuration Cloning Target” dialog box is displayed. Here you can change the target hostname, and choose to immediately push the configuration. Select “Ok”.
And now the “Reboot” dialog box is displayed. Here you can choose how you’d like the reboot to be handled once the configuration is pushed to the device(s). Select your preference, or leave as default and select “Ok”.
You’ll be brought back to the 10ZiG Manager interface. Here you’ll see a new task in the tasks list at the bottom of the window.
Once completed, you have successfully deployed the configuration.

You’re done! You have successfully pushed the configuration template to your 10ZiG Zero Client(s).

You can maintain, edit, and use multiple templates for different users, organizational units, or geographical units.

10ZiG Manager – Add hardware to USB Redirection in Configuration Template

10ZiG, End User Computing, VDI, Zero Clients/Thin Clients 4 Responses »

May 062019

Let’s say you manage numerous 10ZiG Zero clients and your users all have similar USB hardware that needs to be redirected to the VDI session. In most cases the hardware will be redirected without any configuration necesary, but what about when that doesn’t happen. You need to push a configuration template with the device information to your 10ZiG Zero Clients.

In my case, I use a YubiKey Security Key. I regularly use this for logins in Chrome and noticed that it wasn’t being directed via USB redirection.

This post is part two of a three part 10ZiG Manager Tutorial series:

Now there’s two ways to do this:

On the 10ZiG Zero Client, go to settings, USB redirection, and change the preference from “Default” to “Include”. This must manually be done on every Zero Client inside of your infrastructure (time consuming).
Add the USB hardware ID to your configuration template inside of the 10ZiG Manager and then push this to all your 10ZiG Zero Clients that you manage (super fast, can be deployed to thousands of devices in seconds).

In this post we’re going to cover the later, and show you how to add this to a config template. In my example, we’ll be adding the YubiKey security key with a hardware identifier (USB Product ID/PID) of 1050/0120 (Vendor ID: 1050, Product ID: 0120). We’ll be manually adding the hardware ID/PID to the config template in this tutorial.

Please Note: You can also add the settings on a 10ZiG Zero Client, and generate a template by pulling the config from that client. You can then push this to others as well.

To find out the Hardware ID/PID, you can either use the “Device Manager” on Windows, or plug in the device in to a 10ZiG Zero Client, go to settings, USB Redirection, and you should see the device name, along with the HID/PID info.

Instructions

Open the 10ZiG Manager.
Randomly choose a 10ZiG Zero Client from the list, right-click on it to open the menu. Expand “Configuration” -> Select “Manage templates”.
In the “Configuration Templates” window, right-click on your existing template (or create a new one), and select “Edit”.
In the “Template Configuration – Template Name” window, double-click on “USB Device Redirection”.
In the “USB Device Redirection” window, click on “Add”.
Enter in a friendly name, and enter your Vendor ID and Product ID in to the fields. For a YubiKey Security key, I did the following.
Click OK on all the fields, save the template. The configuration has been saved to the configuration template.

You’re done! You can now deploy this template to a single 10ZiG Zero Client, or deploy it as a batch to many 10ZiG Zero Clients.

10ZiG Manager – Create Configuration Template from 10ZiG Zero Client

10ZiG, End User Computing, VDI, Zero Clients/Thin Clients 4 Responses »

May 062019

So you’ve purchase some 10ZiG Zero Clients, configured the 10ZiG Manager, and want to create a configuration template to deploy to all your devices.

In this post, we’ll be going over how to create a configuration template from a manually configured 10ZiG Zero Client, so that you can edit it, and then deploy it to other 10ZiG Zero Clients (whether it’s a single unit, or 10,000).

Once you have a configuration template, you can add certificates, modify the VDI configuration, configure keyboard/mouse input, USB Redirection, and more! Doing all this with a configuration template allows you to manage and maintain a large amount of 10ZiG Zero Clients with ease.

This post is part one of a three part 10ZiG Manager Tutorial series:

Please Note: We are going to assume that you have manually configured at least one of your 10ZiG Zero Clients as a base configuration that you want to generate a template from. If not, make sure you do this before generating a template. We are also assuming that you have configured the 10ZiG Management software so that the Zero Clients can connect to it.

Instructions

Open the 10ZiG Manager.
Choose the 10ZiG Zero Client that you have already configured in the list and right-click on the unit.
In the menu, expand “Configuration” -> and Select “Generate Template”.
A warning explaining how the configuration is merged is presented, please read and understand this.
In the “Configuration Templates” window, type in a template name in to the “Template Name” field, and then select “Ok”. I’m calling mine “DA-MainTemplate”.
A warning explaining changes is presented, please read and understand this.
You will be brought back to the 10ZiG Manager, and will see the “Generate configuration template” task in the tasks list at the bottom of the window. It should eventually complete and be marked as successful.
The configuration template has been created.

You have now created a configuration template inside of 10ZiG Manager! You can edit this, and eventually deploy it to other 10ZiG Zero Clients on your network.

Ubuntu Linux – Black screen and frozen system after upgrade and/or install

Linux, Ubuntu 86 Responses »

May 052019

After upgrading a computer from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, during boot the screen goes blank (turns black), all HD disk activity halts, and the system becomes frozen. This event can also occur on a fresh installation or when updates are installed.

This is due to a video mode issue that causes the system to halt or freeze. It’s much like the issue I described here on a Fedora Linux system.

Temporary Fix

To get the system to boot:

After turning on your PC, hold the right SHIFT key to get to the GRUB bootloader if your computer uses a BIOS. If your computer uses EFI or UEFI, continuously tap the “ESC” (escape) key after turning on your PC.
Once GRUB is open, press the “e” key to edit the first highlighted entry “Ubuntu”.
Move your cursor down to the line that starts with “linux”, and use the right arrow key to find the section with the words “ro quiet splash”.
Add “nomodeset” after these words.
```
nomodeset
```
Feel free to remove “quiet” and “splash” for more verbosity to troubleshoot the boot process.
Press “CTRL + X” or “F10” to boot.
The system should now boot.

Permanent Fix

To permanently resolve the issue:

Once the system has booted using the temporary fix, log in.
Open a terminal window (Applications -> Terminal, or press the “Start” button and type terminal).
Either “su” in to root, or use “sudo” to open your favorite text editor and edit the file “/etc/default/grub” (I use nano which can be install by running “apt install nano”):
```
nano /etc/default/grub
```
Locate the line with the variable “GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT”, and add “nomodeset” to the variables. Feel free to remove “splash” and “quiet” if you’d like text boot. Here’s an example of my line after editing (yours will look different):
```
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nomodeset"
```
Save the file and exit the text editor (CTRL+X to quit, the press “y” and enter to save).
At the bash prompt, execute the following command to regenerate the grub.conf file on the /boot partition from your new default file:
```
update-grub
```
Restart your system, it should now boot!

Please Note: Always make sure you have a full system backup before modifying any system files!

Cannot install Ubuntu Linux due to lack of resources (memory)

Linux, Ubuntu, Uncategorized No Responses »

May 042019

You’re trying to install Ubuntu on your computer, but it freezes due to lack of resources, specifically memory. This can happen when you’re trying to re-purpose old laptops, netbooks, etc.

This recently happened to met as I tried to install Ubuntu on an old HP Netbook. Originally I used Fedora, but had to switch to Ubuntu due to library issues (I wanted to use the VMware Horizon Client on it).

Unfortunately, when I’d kick off the USB installer, the OS would completely freeze (mouse either unresponsive, or extremely glitchy).

The Fix – External SWAP File

In the ~5 minutes where the system is operable, I used the key sequence “CTRL + ALT + F2” to get to a text tty console session. From here I noticed the system eventually uses all the RAM and maxes out the memory. When this occurs, this is when the system becomes unresponsive.

Since this is a Live CD installer, there is no swap file for the system to use once the RAM has filled up.

To fix this and workaround the problem, I grabbed a second blank USB stick and used it as an external swap file. Using this allowed me to run the installer, complete the installer, and successfully install Ubuntu.

Please make sure you are choosing the right device names in the instructions below. Choosing the wrong device name can cause your to write to the wrong USB stick, or worse the hard drive of your system.

Instructions:

Attached USB Installer, boot system.
Once system has booted, press “CTRL + ALT + F2” to open a tty console session.
Login using user: “Ubuntu” with a blank password.
Type “sudo su” to get a root shell.
Type in “tail -f /var/log/kern.log” and connect your spare blank USB stick that you want to use for SWAP space. Note the device name, in my case it was “/dev/sdd”.
Press “CTRL + C” to stop tailing the log file, then run “fdisk /dev/sdd” and replace “/dev/sdd” with whatever your device was. PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU ARE CHOOSING THE RIGHT USB DEVICE NAME.
Use “n” to create a new partition, follow the prompts, when it asks for size I randomly chose “+2G” for a 2GB swap file. Use “w” to write the partition table and then quit the fdisk application.
Run “mkswap /dev/sdd1” and replace “sdd1” with the device and partition number of your USB Swap stick. This will format the partition and mark it as a SWAP filesystem.
Run “swapon /dev/sdd1” and replace “sdd1” with your swap partition you created. This will activate the external swap file on the USB stick.
Press “CTRL + ALT + F1” to return to the Ubuntu installation guide. Continue the install as normal.

This should also work for other Linux distributions, as I have also used this in the past with Fedora (on a Single Board Computer with almost no RAM).

During the install process where the Ubuntu installer formats your hard drive, the install will actually mount the hard drive swap file as well (it’ll use both). Once the installer is complete, shut down the system and remove the USB SWAP stick.

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