(warninig this will be a bit biased since you are asking on a FOG forum) Truthfully setting up FOG is pretty easy and is a solid foundation for pxe booting, even multi pxe booting. iPXE is a superior network booting environment as compared to syslinux or grub. With iPXE you can transfer the boot image via http, https, nfs, tftp, and sanboot.

In regards to converting your grub menus to iPXE, i have a tutorial on using FOG as a netboot server: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/10944/using-fog-to-pxe-boot-into-your-favorite-installer-images

In regards to uefi vs bios, you need the proper bootloader for bios and uefi respectively. This is the same requriement for whatever boot loader you use. For FOG the default one for bios is undionly.kpxe for uefi is ipxe.efi. Most uefi boot loaders end in a .efi extension. For bios/ufei coexistence we have a wiki page for setting up your dhcp server (Win2012 and newer, or linux) so dynamically provide the proper bootloader based on the target computer: https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/BIOS_and_UEFI_Co-Existence If you have a soho or router dhcp server that doesn’t support dynamic boot files then you can always install dnsmasq on your fog server to supply the dynamic boot loader. Understand that fog and clonezilla are built on opensouce stack so these tutorials above can be reused for other applications (dnsmasq is dnsmasq, tftp is tftp and so on)

@george1421 A Merry Christmas and a Happy new year to you guys.

@Sebastian-Roth the upper case is a mistake, oops sorry about that. Search is working now thanks all. it was the search box that was not displaying, so i could not type anything in, just clicking the search magnifying glass (expecting a search box to open), of course with no words to search it couldn’t find anything

@george1421
No problem, anything to help the community.

Just to update everyone…
Decided to go with @george1421 on this one.
It was a full day of “switch PXEClient Settings, Deploy , switch PXEClient again, Collect and repeat” but it worked out well and I have all my images in FOG now.
Thank you all for the help and advice!

A quick look at https://www.php.net/manual/en/migration74.php makes me think there shouldn’t be too many issues, though without a code evaluation I can’t say for certain.

Here is a sanitized version of my unattend.xml file and how I call the sysprep. I used pretty much the same unattend.xml file with windows 10 deployments.

https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/11920/windows-10-1803-sysprep-problem/7

I might recommend that you build your reference image on a virtual machine so you can take snapshots to save the system state as important steps. This saves countless hours of having to start over from the beginning when something goes bad.

@chasosnature Pretty close… it’s nodeBB

@FredG said in How to update FOS?:

Ok I thought that the development of FOS was independent of the development of the FOG server.

Yes, correct.

You are on the right track with what you posted so far. We just try to ask because sometimes people head down a road that costs a lot of effort and is not needed. In your case I guess it’s quite a nice idea you look into generating your custom FOS initrds to be able to play with it. Two things I’d mention:

Best you use the versions we currently use as well to prevent from possible issues that might just arise when using newer ones that we have not tested yet. Find the version numbers here: https://github.com/FOGProject/fos/blob/master/Jenkinsfile#L12

Be aware there is a much easier way to modify existing FOS initrds: https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/Modifying_the_Init_Image#Version_1.0.0_and_up

@Daniel-Miller it was indeed some permission issue coming from the application. I will try to manually reset it and see if it works. Thanks a lot for your help!

@Foglalt Beside George’s great and thorough answer you can also read through this as well: https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Booting_into_FOG_and_Capturing_your_first_Image

Thanks, everyone for the help. Our new laptops arrived today and I plan on a rollout after the holiday break (January 6th). I hope I gave myself enough time.

Mark

Doh - I actually didn’t realize the “Multiple Partition Image - Single Disk” could do a single partition! I just tried a capture using this and it seems to work fine - haven’t had a chance for a deploy yet. I guess since I foresee only rarely changing partition sizes, this option would work fine.

@Mark-krikunov said in Lock out Setting:

computers it self on a timer, but this can be removed by students

Not via a domain GPO. If the setting is configured by GPO is a rule and can’t be changed.

As for the linux side there isn’t a gpo equivalent so each instant would have to be configured.

It should. OS isn’t really that relevant. Its the component software: webserver software, php, and mysql that you need to make sure is compatible.

@isaiah658 Just wait until you try out the new ZSTD compression. 🙂

@Sebastian-Roth said in Updating FOG and retaining settings:

@willian Upgrade will rewrite the DHCP config of your FOG server. So make a backup copy if you have modified it.

I could even clone the server for testing but later I will see how I do.

As well make sure you read und understand this before you upgrade: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/13488/fog-1-5-7-officially-released

Is there any important information in this topic about this issue? I read everything but I saw nothing related.

Thanks.

@george1421 thanks for pointing me to the conf file! Changing the default option to the 2nd choice did the trick and now it boots straight to OS. I guess it got hung on the 1st choice.

Here is the line I changed from:
default_selection 1
to:
default_selection grubx64
in /var/www/html/fog/service/ipxe/refind.conf

My next article will be on load-balancing FOG’s web frontend and database backend… I’ve just not wrote it yet… Don’t wait on me, it might be a while.

Why would you want to run both clonezilla and FOG? FOG uses partclone which is the same program clonezilla uses. That said, it’s one thing if you wanted to use a CloneZilla Image on a host. We do have support for that, by simple creating the Image definition and setting the Image Manager to Uncompressed. FOG, however, has many more options readily available and configurable via the GUI. Again, this is not to say you cannot use Clonezilla images with FOG. However, FOG manages hosts, inventory, images, and much more through a simple web gui. Running clonezilla is possible, but still means you have the manual tasks to complete.

I guess we need to understand the why of this more so we can try to help you out more.