Uninstalling the Fog server

The FOG installer can remove itself:

cd fogproject/bin
./installfog.sh --uninstall

The guiding rule is remove what FOG installed, keep what FOG stored. Everything FOG put on the server — its own files, its services, its configuration — is removed. Your data is not, unless you explicitly ask for it.

That means an uninstall is normally recoverable: reinstall over what is left and FOG picks your hosts, images and snapins back up. It also makes this a reasonable way to rebuild a server that has got into a bad state without losing anything.

!!! warning “Uninstall is not reversible in every case” The --purge-* options below are destructive and there is no undo. Read What the purge options remove before using them, particularly --purge-ssl.

See what it would do first

--dry-run prints the complete plan and exits without changing anything:

./installfog.sh --uninstall --dry-run

Run this first. The output lists every path that would be removed, every configuration file that would be restored, and the fate of each piece of your data.

What is always removed

Services	The eight FOG daemons — stopped, disabled, and their unit files deleted
Program files	/opt/fog/service, /opt/fog/log, /opt/fog/cache, /opt/fog/reporting, /opt/fog/php.loc, /opt/fog/.fogsettings
Web files	The FOG web directory under your document root, and the fog symlink beside it
System entries	/etc/fog, the /var/log/fog symlink, /etc/cron.d/fog_reporting, /etc/nfs.conf.d/fog-nfs.conf
Web server	FOG’s own virtual host (fog.conf or 001-fog.conf)
TFTP	The contents of the TFTP root — PXE binaries and boot menus

If your FOG lives somewhere other than /opt/fog, the uninstaller finds it the same way the installer does, via /etc/fog/fog.conf. You can also point it explicitly with --fogprogramdir.

What is always kept

Packages are never removed. The web server, database server, NFS server and PHP are routinely shared with other things on the same machine, and the installer does not record which of them it installed versus found already present. Removing them is left to you.

Your data is kept by default:

• the FOG database
• your images
• your snapins
• the SSL CA
• the fogproject Linux account

Configuration files FOG replaced

FOG does not add lines to /etc/exports, vsftpd.conf, dhcpd.conf or (on some distributions) the web server config. It moves the existing file aside as <file>.<timestamp> and writes its own version.

On uninstall these are restored from the oldest such backup, which is the genuine pre-FOG original — newer ones are just FOG’s own earlier versions. The version FOG was using is kept as <file>.fog-uninstall.<timestamp> rather than deleted, so nothing is lost.

!!! note “Check these afterwards” If you edited any of those files yourself after installing FOG, those edits are in the .fog-uninstall. copy, not in the restored file. Review them before restarting the affected service.

What the purge options remove

These are opt-in, and permanent.

Option	Removes
--purge-db	Drops the FOG database — hosts, images, snapins, users, task history
--purge-images	Deletes your image storage, normally /images
--purge-snapins	Deletes your snapins
--purge-ssl	Deletes the SSL CA — see below
--purge-user	Deletes the fogproject Linux account and its home directory
--purge-all	All of the above

!!! danger “--purge-ssl permanently breaks every fog-client” The CA private key signs the certificate every fog-client validates, and the iPXE binaries are built trusting it. Delete it and every client you have deployed stops talking to the server, and every PXE binary must be rebuilt. There is no recovery — each client has to be reinstalled by hand.

Do not use this unless you are decommissioning the server for good.

The CA lives under the snapins directory (/opt/fog/snapins/ssl by default), which is why the uninstaller removes FOG’s directories individually rather than deleting /opt/fog wholesale.

The database is dumped to your backup path before anything happens, whatever options you pass, since it is the only part that cannot be rebuilt from the FOG sources.

Confirmation

The uninstaller shows you the full plan and asks you to type the server’s hostname to continue. Anything else aborts without changing a thing.

-Y/--autoaccept does not satisfy this prompt. That flag is already present in a lot of people’s install scripts, and it must never be enough to wipe a server by accident. For automation that genuinely means it, use --force:

./installfog.sh --uninstall --force

Examples

Remove FOG, keep everything you care about:

./installfog.sh --uninstall

Preview a full decommission without touching anything:

./installfog.sh --uninstall --purge-all --dry-run

Rebuild a broken server — uninstall, then reinstall over the surviving data:

./installfog.sh --uninstall
./installfog.sh

Decommission the machine completely, unattended:

./installfog.sh --uninstall --purge-all --force

Troubleshooting

“No FOG installation found”

The uninstaller reads .fogsettings to learn what your install created — which document root, which storage location, which database. Without it there is nothing it can safely remove, so it stops rather than guessing at paths that might belong to something else.

If FOG is installed somewhere other than /opt/fog, tell it where:

./installfog.sh --uninstall --fogprogramdir /srv/fog

Services still listed after uninstalling

The unit files are removed and systemd is reloaded, but a shell that was open beforehand may still show cached completions. Open a new one.

The web server still serves something at /fog

FOG’s virtual host is removed but the web server is not restarted, in case the machine serves other sites. Reload it yourself when you are ready.