I’m sort of ashamed that I haven’t done any of the things I said I’d do in this thread yet 😕 I’ll make it a point to test out the various file types soon.

@chimchild That would do it. I favor iptables for major network appliances. It’s commands and config make more sense to me than firewalld does.

@C-M said in How do fog images work and can it do this?:

I’d prefer the thin method as it seems easier to keep up to date and add and remove apps at will.

Both thin and fat images have their place. If you update your images every quarter (to have the latest windows updates) then adding in your software is not a big deal (as long as MDT does it). There isn’t any more work involved than having a thin image and layering on the applications post deployment. Plus with a fat image I can go from bare metal to fully deploy and ready to move to the work site in about 13 minutes. That is with MS Office, SAP GUI, AutoCAD, and a few other PIG applications.

Using a fat image (and a multicast deployment) I can redeploy to a whole lab (50 workstations) in about 20 minutes. With that said there is also uses for thin images where you might have a dynamic application load. In that case we push the image out with FOG and then use PDQ Deploy to deploy the application set to the workstation. (I could use FOG Snapins for this too, we just had PDQ Deploy setup first).

Nope not a problem. But its easier with dhcp.

You may be able to do what you want using snapins and a 3rd party tool.

i believe i was able to get the esxi iso to boot using memdisk iso raw

Yeah that makes more sense

@Wayne-Workman

Thanks Wayne.

For anyone who finds this thread, on Ubuntu, just cd to /etc/php5/apache2 then edit php.ini

Using nano to edit, find upload_max_filesize and post_max_size and increase both as desired. I increased mine to 3000M (3GB approx.)

@Sebastian-Roth Go ahead and mark it solved, I haven’t had time to test and probably won’t anytime soon. It’s that busy time of the year 🙂

@mm-Ekimia May I point you to a topic in the iPXE forum where one of the main developers was saying that “USB support is starting to arrive in mainline iPXE” only about a good year ago. They have made progress I am sure! We have seen more and more people successfully booting their devices with USB NICs on iPXE.

The biggest problem from my point of view is if you want to PXE boot from the USB NIC! Using an USB NIC with linux (as you do right now) is fairly easy because linux takes control and provides full access through own drivers. Completely different if you want to PXE boot from the USB NIC. Then your client machine - its BIOS/UEFI firmware - must be able and willing to talk to the USB NIC for PXE booting. Sounds like you don’t aim for that but just wanted to point that out!

Back to your initial question… booting iPXE via USB key - which is easier than USB NIC PXE booting but still harder than booting linux to use the USB NIC. As George already said it’s a matter of finding a USB NIC adapter that is supported by iPXE. I started a list of supported USB NICs some time ago. Unfortunately I lost track of it all as it was very hard to follow without having my own devices for testing. Maybe this is a good point to start again. Searching the forums we should be able to find a lot of information as lots of people have tried USB NICs lately, known working e.g. ASIX AX88772C…

But that’s still not the whole story I’m afraid! iPXE provides native drivers (should work both for UEFI and legacy BIOS) as well as UNDI (for BIOS) and SNP (for UEFI):

undionly.pxe, kpxe, kkpxe, usb, iso - BIOS no native drivers ipxe.pxe, … - BIOS with native drivers and UNDI interface snponly.efi, usb, iso - UEFI no native drivers ipxe.efi, … - UEFI with native drivers and SNP interface smsc95xx/intel/realtek.XXX - “single” native driver

So you might need to play with the different iPXE binaries to see which one is working for you. Please let us know which USB NIC exactly you have - make and model!!

Edit: I just updated the mentioned wiki article. Hope this is useful for a lot of people. Please keep us up to date with USB NIC adapters you try.

@Sebastian-Roth @Wayne-Workman I think an adjustable time would be nice though. Hard coding in a time might not be best for everyone, I am not a seasoned programmer but coding a field in the DB along the same lines as the FOG_SERVICE_CHECKIN_TIME to give the time a value doesn’t seem like it should be much harder. FOG_CRON_TASK_EXPIRY. Having it a global value, and not per task I think would be fine.

That way it could be set in a fashion of every night run this task, if task hasn’t been run in X min delete task. This would allow a task to run at anytime through the night, but expire before morning when the computer would be used.

@Wayne-Workman bolder the better, I say 👍

@fredlwal Most probably a FTP credentials problem: https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/Troubleshoot_FTP

And if you don’t want to upgrade to FOG trunk you can find hundreds and thousands of articles on how to generate self signed certificates. Try searching the web. The first few that come up:
https://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/392099-creating-self-signed-ssl-certificates-for-apache-on-linux
http://www.akadia.com/services/ssh_test_certificate.html
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/ssl-certificate-self

Or use tools like TinyCA if you prefer GUI programs.

@Wayne-Workman

Hello,

I’ve checked and tested again today and it’s working now perfectly. I have probably done something wrong. Sorry for this false problem.

cheers.

Thank you @Tom-Elliott

the Win7 and Win10 is probably easier - and you wouldn’t even bother with the ISO itself, but just copy the files to a windows share. Then, if you can just get WinPE to work (there are advanced copies out there now), then use that to just get to the share and launch the setup.exe, far more efficient than loading a huge ISO into the RAM of a machine that may or may not have it to spare.

But, for linux based ISOs, you’d mount as read-only with loopback, and then you’d point to the kernel and init after it’s mounted via NFS. I think you will find the below articles helpful.

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/how-to-mount-iso-image-under-linux.html

http://ipxe.org/appnote/ubuntu_live

@Sebastian-Roth I see. A coincidence this was the IP address of my old server, so that is the reason I asked.

@Tom-Elliott I’m on a roll with these questions with obvious answers…sigh…thanks again Tom!

All snapins do run as the “SYSTEM” user, it’s how the fog client is designed.

What exactly does bitlocker need to operate? I’m new to bitlocker.