@susdtech said in New to Fog:

Do you need to pxe boot a desks top in order to capture or image a computer?

Yes. If that’s not possible for you, clonezilla would suite you better than FOG. FOG’s designed to remotely image thousands of systems and then configure all of those systems for you automatically. Clonezilla is doesn’t do that because it doesn’t scale, but Clonezilla is awesome at simply taking and putting images via USB.

Also, Is the client needed as well to complete this process?

No. But once you learn the power of the client, you’ll wonder how you managed to live without it.

I have tried installing the client on a Windows 10 VM and get the following error. “Unable to install CA certificate”
thanks for any help you can offer.

Try disabling antivirus. Also ensure you’re putting in the right fog IP address, and that the host is not pending in Host Management.

@avicitiffany You have the wrong tool. The FOG Project is used for copying windows images to computers. I has nothing to do with graphic arts.

@loosus456 Without directly knowing your setup I might be a little off the track with my guesses but here it goes, see what it’s worth for:

You need some kind of EFI boot manager (entry) to boot Windows. This is what Boot Camp usually does for you and it can be done using rEFInd for example as well. This boot entry is partly stored in NVRAM (not on disk) an therefore will persist even if you delete the macOS partition. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t need that. I think there is a chance you can do what you want because FOG comes with rEFInd on board that can start Windows straight from PXE booting. PXE to the FOG menu and default exit style rEFInd should do the trick. That gets me to your second question.

You can use USB keys to boot up into the FOG menu - this is not essentially PXE booted but it’s still partly network booting after the initial boot from USB. But you can also fully PXE most Macs! Take a look at our wiki article on this. One simple method I like is blessing the Mac so it does load iPXE straight from the FOG TFTP server without you having to setup DHCP properly. But in your case I don’t think that’s a good option because once macOS is gone it’ll be very hard to change the blessing later on. So you can either go the “Using stones…” method or set the Macs to netboot before deleting macOS - the later has a similar issue to the “Using stones” method because you can’t easily change the bootup setting if macOS is not installed anymore.

I don’t know of any tool that can set boot configuration in NVRAM on Macs other than macOS itself. Possibly tools exist but I don’t know of any. Maybe it can be done using a macOS boot USB key? Give it a go and let us know!

Special note: There is one particular ethernet card in some Macs that do have an issue with iPXE on macOS Sierra and newer - see here! I am working on this but I can’t say when I’ll get that fixed. But it’s only that one particular NIC as far as we know - Broadcom 57765. Take a look at the device manager (About my Mac) to see if you have that NIC in your Macs.

@kktwenty101 said in upgrading to 1.4.x - fog client version?:

building a brand new FOG server to supplement the old one.

You can follow along with this article: https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Migrate_FOG

yes it can do what you want. FOG stores all of its data in an easy to read database. We looked at automating FOG from another of our applications in the past (but didn’t bother going forward as it didn’t actually save us much admin). For FOG tasks (scheduled, instant, delayed etc), simply insert something into the fog.scheduledTasks database for a scheduled task etc (the fog.taskTypes gives you an indication of what you can do). The backup process kicks in from the pxe by default in FOG. You can set a task to reboot the PC too in FOG if you wish.

Obviously it is a DISK BACKUP not an incremental backup. Expect the backups to take many minutes if you run high compression. Even low compression is a heavy task.

It will be a network backup, local backups (to USB etc) will not be possible unless you configure multiple storage nodes per PC (not practical).

@george1421 said in Win 10 image:

@jackiejack You can, but they are mostly wrong for your current setup.

No what I mean is for the SIM part. Can I follow it? Or this one:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/settings-for-automating-oobe
Or this one
http://searchenterprisedesktop.techtarget.com/tip/Create-a-hands-free-Windows-10-install-image-for-the-OOBE

See what particular scares me is section 25 v 2 b vi of https://forums.fogproject.org/assets/uploads/files/1469134024622-fog-universal-image-setup-win-7.pdf?v=78s341l4bha

she says

It seems odd to add this twice, but otherwise after sysprep it will still
prompt for an initial local account name. It may be possible to remove
the OOBE section, but I haven’t experimented with it.

Since I wanted a fully automated install of win 10 (with 2 admin accounts) should I follow this windows 7 guide? Or use the other links?

Or create the local admin accounts in audit mode first (not in SIM) then SkipUserOOBE but they say that is deprecated.

@develroo Check with your hardware (or tell us what it is and we can help you find it) to see if it contains a UUID field? When the PXE rom sends the first dhcp discover packet if it fills out the UUID field in the dhcp discover packet then you might be able to do something.

If that field is populated and unique per hardware model then you can dynamically switch between by either creating profiles in Windows 2012 dhcp or use isc-dhcp or dnsmasq both on your FOG server to make the dynamic changes.

From Lexmark’s site

Download then run the executable. Tell it to extract for later installation.

Find this:

C:\Lexmark\Lexmark_MS510_Series_ADU_Installation_Package\InstallationPackage\InstallationPackage\Drivers\Print\GDI\LMADUP40.inf

@sebastian-roth said in FOG server with dhcp client registration:

@Pikmin I don’t like guessing much so we should just take a look at the facts - the packets on the network that is. So get your client ready but don’t start it yet. Go to your FOG server and install tcpdump (sudo apt-get install tcpdump or sudo yum install tcpdump). Then run the following command and substitute x.x.x.x with the client’s IP address: tcpdump -w /tmp/boot_issue.pcap host x.x.x.x

Leave that command sitting there, boot up the client till it shows the error “Either DHCP failed or …”. Now stop tcpdump (Ctrl+c). Upload the generated file /tmp/boot_issue.pcap to your dropbox/google drive and post a link here or send me a private message if you don’t want to share this with the rest of the world.

I just went through the process of doing this when I discovered that after issuing spanning-tree portfast on all the interfaces it appears to be working now, so that’s the solution like in the other thread.
Thanks again for all your help george1421 and Sebastian Roth, I won’t forget the porfast setting ever again

@bc601 There’s only one way to create groups via Host Management - that’s by selecting the hosts you want in the new group, then at the bottom of the page put a group name into the ‘Create new group’ field. Then click Update.

Also, you can add hosts to an existing group via the dropdown at the bottom of host management. You can also create new groups via Group Management.

@erlon111 Sounds like fast boot is enabled… always disable fast boot when using cloning software!

@lebowski while its not dynamic data fog does install/alter files in

/var/www/html/fog
/etc/<apache_config>

You could (might want to) consolidate /images and move it into /opt/fog/images you can do that with a loop mount or when you install FOG point to that location instead of the default location of /images.

If you are going to use dnsmasq for your setup then /etc/dnsmasq.conf and /etc/dnsmasq.d

The other issue is installing/upgrading fog. If you use the github method you need a location to clone the repository.

@redbob I’ve updated the wiki to include details for creating a user in FOG in 1.4.0 and 1.5.0. Future readers can find that information here: https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Password_Central#Web_Interface

First I have to get the legal bit out of the way. Microsoft OEM EULA licenses do not allow you to clone an OEM image and deploy it to another computer. You must have a MS Volume license key for this. You only need one volume license key per version of windows OS you need to deploy. So the cost is not bad.

I do think we have something lost in what you say.

Do you what to take a single partition and deploy it to another computer or another partition on the same computer?

@sourceminer Although I can’t say for sure what’s going on in your case I am fairly sure that FOG does not restore the wrong image.

How do you see it’s the “wrong” image? Wrong name in the output on screen or wrong content on the PC after deploy? Maybe you re-captured the image and it’s been overwritten with the “wrong” content?

I’ve not done any more work on this. The best solution is still to have permanent tunnels from site to site via a routing appliance like a Cisco router or checkpoint router or PFSense router or some other router solution.

@sabotage Put a small server at each site. The hardware can be your choosing. You could use small and low-end servers if you have the money, or you could use old desktops for it. Up to you. Then setup your main FOG Server at HQ, and install all the site’s boxes as fog storage nodes. The storage-node installation process allows you to attach it to a main fog server. Then setup the location plugin and configure all your locations. We have documentation for this in our wiki. But…

For now - you really should just setup a test FOG Server at your HQ and just try things out. Generally, newbies of FOG have lots of questions about basic stuff.