why would you want to blindly apply windows updates post image anyway? surely you should be going through some form of testing at least…?

maybe that varies in different environments and we have to air on the side of caution because if our systems go down/stop working people start dying… lol

@rmurra81 said in Do windows update on uploded image stored on fog server:

It would be very difficult to inject Windows updates into an image, but what this thread should be talking about is to spin up a VM with those image files. This would allow you to run updates, install programs, maintenance, etc. It seems stupid to me that the conversation didn’t go there. Why would you spend all your resources updating this FOG server software for it only to do windows update? Tom Elliott, that is a waste of time. Deploying an image to a PC and then running updates just to capture it. Just setup WDS and run a VM. This feature already exists and it seems like it wouldn’t be that difficult. Maybe some button to deploy to a VM within the FOG Server.

that’s how you should be building your images… build on VM, snapshot/create checkpoint before sysprep/capture… when you need to apply windows updates to your “image”, revert vm to snapshot/checkpoint - apply windows updates, snapshot again before sysprep/capture etc etc etc…

you’ll have a cleaner image building on VM and you avoid rearm restriction as theoretically your image only ever gets sysprepped once (as you revert to unsysprepped state before applying changes/update)

so that’s not a feature needed in FOG that’s a learning curve or a “suggestion” if you’d like that we need to teach FOG administrators…

“Maybe some button to deploy to a VM within the FOG Server”… that’s what the deploy task button is for 🙂 unless i’ve been up far too long and i’m reading that wrong, you clearly don’t understand the architecture behind virtualisation if you think that could be implemented so easily. it would kill most environments just trying to implement that and most FOG Servers are being hosted on a VM already so then you’re talking about nested VMs and that’s just the tip of the iceburg on that head ache… can of worms springs to mind just to do something you can already easily and quickly do a thousand different ways as wayne and tom pointed out a few below

Edit: Just read the other thread you’re discussing this - if you mean deploy the image to a vm, you can do that like you would a physical machine, register the VM within FOG and deploy image, do your updates and maintenance etc etc and then capture, don’t think i fully understand your VM Feature request, maybe you could explain better?

@Junkhacker said in Deploy Image to VM:

something i’ve done is to just leave windows running on a vm, getting windows updates automatically, and having a scheduled upload task that runs every week. you’ll want to not install the vm tools for the machine, since they can seem to cause some odd behavior when the image gets deployed back to real hardware

I’m using the same 😉 Plus I use chocolatey to update some critical programs (schedule taskl) : https://chocolatey.org/

Thanks Wayne, I do have similar groups for my hosts.

What i meant was a way to group snapins. (If you have used PDQ, where you can put packages into folders)

Take one of my primary schools, it uses 16 or so apps that are all from 2simple. I was after a way to put them all under a group/heading on the snapins page called 2simple.

I have them assigned to the Primary IT Suite Host Group. But i was think more of a way to have the snapins page cleaner instead of one big list.

First, I’ll try to break down my thoughts on things just so you understand what fog IS vs. what it’s “aim” to replace things are.

FOG derived from a more affordable and faster medium compared to Ghost back in the day’s when it essentially ruled the roost. While there were alternatives to Ghost back in 2007 such as PING (Ping Is Not Ghost) and utilities that helped perform image capture, there wasn’t much of a simple means to perform the actions needed. This made imaging systems, useful, but almost everybody tied to using Ghost.

Chuck and Jian had a need for imaging systems but could no longer afford Ghost so they decided to write a tool to perform actions with a relatively simple interface. The initial release of FOG was intended to be more a “proof” of concept and was not expected to gain such a following (at least I don’t think it was).

FOG was created to Image systems using a simple interface. The idea of the interface was to be easily manageable without requiring the “admin’s” to get up out of their seats if possible. This is why FOG has a web based GUI vs some of the other more manually intense mechanisms.

It wasn’t until later on in the use of FOG by other people that FOG started becoming an Imaging Solution AND System Management solution.

To break it down, FOG is not a Virtualization system, nor is it a backup solution. It’s purpose in the realm of Information Technology is to allow you to create “clones” of one system and place those clones onto many other systems. These clones, while most still kind of use a Hardware Dependent setup, can be used on nearly any system you want. With the use of the FOG Client it can also be used to join systems to a domain, manage software installations or script operations through snapins, add/remove/manage printers, automate task actions, perform power management such as shutdown/reboot, wake systems up, and log users out. With the registration of systems, you can also maintain an inventory record of systems.

FOG’s intention is not to replace anything, but to be a more useful alternative to other imaging tools as possible.

@Tom-Elliott said in Add the name field in Users table:

I just separated the “change password” and “edit fields” elements. Hopefully this doesn’t mean much recoding on your part for the Access control plugin you’re working on @Fernando-Gietz

I insert the role selectbox after username

0_1490232257603_upload-4f63a6f9-f6b1-4705-8725-3b5b9e53acec

Apparently with 0.2.88 (maybe earlier but before that for us was 0.2.69) they added a “note” feature

The picture shows the (note:) line now which shows the Storage location and the Image name.

@george1421 thx is why i was paused blinking.

@JJ-Fullmer Well it wasn’t actually phpipam that was slowing it down.
I had some ssl logs running for a website running on that server. It was tracking access logs for every access of the ssl cert and site. Which was also adding up to over 400 GB of logs. I changed the apache configuration of the site to log much less. That solved the problem. So again, nothing wrong with zstd. Just wanted to have the right answer in case someone else happens to see a constant 5-8 Mbps transmit and receive on a storage node.

@JulienF I will still work to add a potential for “securing” the aspects that can be secured.

As far as your NFS route, you only have a single subnet to worry about. You could create a secondary “subnet” for FOG imaging if you needed, or just restrict NFS to use that single Subnet (making it no longer publicly (globally) accessible).

@Junkhacker i will inspect the postdownload script section usage (well, documentation search in some topics is hard for fog system, for me at least). but atm we have a lot more disturbing problem, mystery that keeps me away from sleeping. topic is “missing image” 🙂

@x23piracy unfortunately a standard Active Directory contains usually just: hostname, and sid, along with a few other details such as OS version. FOG 2.0 doesn’t rely on MAC addresses as a primary identifier anymore, but still requires some additional information that’s not stored in AD to perform proper host matching. So long story short; no we will not support AD importing for the foreseeable future due to some technical limitations.

Ninja feature.

Default capture method is now in the “FOG Configuration Page->FOG Settings->General Settings category.”

@george1421 i actually don’t think this is as massive of a rewrite/change as you imagine. Tom put a lot of flexibility in the code. I honestly think this could probably all be done with a plugin.

i mean, it’s beyond MY skill level. but someone could do it.

@ITCC this would definitely be a feature request. Power Management takes the approach of “If the user is away, they get logged off, and the machine is shut off”. You may be better off to use either GPO or snapins to achieve this. For example, schedule a CRON snapin that just checks if any users are logged on, otherwise it shutsdown.

@ablohowiak said in Database Maintenance:

What tables would be useful to locate old hosts?

hosts and hostMAC

I can help with the SQL if you have questions. Whatever you come up with, we can probably add it to our existing list of maintenance commands with a little description for each one:
https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Troubleshoot_MySQL

@Wayne-Workman

yes, just to display hosts that have printers & what printers they have assigned to them

I’m not looking for a ‘live’ report of what printers they do have connected

@Tom-Elliott said in change color of icon "upload":

if you don’t want user’s to accidentally overwrite an image, why not just set the image to “protected” and/or change the files so they’re immutable?

This is the proper answer. 1.3.0+ allows you to protect the image from accidental deletion and accidental rewrite.

In 1.3.0+ the terminology is much more clear. In 1.2.0 and below, it was “upload” & “download”. Myself, all of my co-workers, my cousin, and many people on the forums all found this very confusing. So for 1.3.0 and higher, it was changed to “Capture” & “Deploy” and now we see a whole lot less confusion about it.

@jc35 I would recommend you upgrade your FOG Server in the near future to take advantage of these features plus the many others that 1.3.0+ has to offer. You might want to look at this article if you don’t want to disturb the old server and want to start fresh: https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Migrate_FOG

Alright, I’ll look into that.

Thanks, guys!

@Tom-Elliott
@george1421

Thank you for your answers.

I will give it a try next time I need some new challenge!