[quote=“Albatros, post: 27059, member: 16710”]For booting iso files over network that are added to the menu. Take a look at this thread
[url]http://fogproject.org/forum/threads/fog-0-33b-edit-pxe-menu.10403/#post-26419[/url][/quote]

Thanks! This is exactly what I was looking for.

I second using WAIK. It is alot easier than creating an Unattend file by hand. This tutorial helped me out quite a bit: [url]http://theitbros.com/sysprep-a-windows-7-machine-–-start-to-finish/[/url] .

As for activation, that is a tricky issue. My institution uses a KMS server. Somewhere I read that newer machines have the activation key hardwired into the computer somewhere. However that may only be for UEFI installations. If your computers do not have an activation code on the outside and they came with Windows pre-loaded then they key might be in the machine. That being the case any valid copy of Windows is supposed to work without having to enter a product key.

So if my thinking is correct you should be able to simply image the computer and Windows will pull the product key automatically from where ever it is stored. My laptop worked like that. I reinstalled Windows and it never asked me for a product key, but still worked. However I am not sure how that would affect you Unattend file. The only other solution is to create a separate Unattend file for each computer with the product key for that machine which is not an ideal solution.

Got it! Thanks Junkhacker! I am looking forward to upgrading my FOG server with 1.0.0 this summer.

Rock on, Tom! Thank you so much for your help!

Basically the software is stored on the storage node and gets copied down to the pc after image, also setup samba to the folder so its available as a software rep/share, we have a node on each site (any site that has more than 10 machines on site) so everything is “available” on the local network so no need to go down slow links etc… then the snapin is just a script n it determines what software is needed by hostname, model and location so once it determines what is needed jst installs them in order, i’ve used powershell in the past bt using autoit atm because its easier to be creative with GUI’s. Also got multiple tftps so the only “data” that is coming from “off” site is the snapin which is tiny 1.5MB n jst task n progress sent bk to server, so tiny tiny amounts 😄 so its jst as quick regardless of the remote site.

Perhaps I miscommunicated a bit. Typically an MSI is deployed through a domain rather than an EXE. This allows the domain to control what is done with the installer a bit more, including the use of an MST. The MST is a transform file that feeds the MSI commands and/or fills in options that the MSI usually contains. By default all domain managed MSI installs are silent, so in addition to not wanting to rely on the end user to know what buttons to push on an installer, an MST is necessary for anything other than a completely default install. I COULD replace the .ini files, but I would have to do this with another script, and I don’t know of a way to do this that is smart enough to run once per install, but also run again later if the install is marked as damaged or is somehow removed.

I’ve dug into the MSI a bit, and I have found a section under _Validation where I can modify a Table AppID with Column RemoteServerName. I will do some testing and report back.

Um Yes 🙂

I did reinstall php5 It Works!

[quote=“Psycholiquid71, post: 26623, member: 2717”]I keep seeing on Spiceworks about FOG being dead. It really bothers me as I see Tom doing a ton of work daily to make this comm unity a really good place. Small yes but good none the less. If anyone here uses spiceworks try to promote this a little bit more as I love this product and don’t want people to “slander it” as I have been seeing.

Slander is a strong word for it but misinformation is just what is happening. and it erks me.[/quote]

I have a spiceworks account. I have not had much time, between keeping you all updated on the forums and trying to fix and or program FOG itself, to go through to all the posts on Spiceworks in regards to FOG. I will try my best to do better, but it may be a bit while we’re ramping up for release.

Thx [SIZE=12px]Junkhacker; I’m on 0.32 in this case; after some testing I think the message “compression level…” may not be credible; if when it says NONE the imager clearly uses compression since the final *.img file is nowhere near the actual partition used up space. Could there be some truth to that?[/SIZE]

On image compression I found this super helpful post:

[SIZE=4][B][COLOR=#3b3b3b][FONT=League Gothic][SIZE=35px][URL=‘http://uberamd.com/post/22125061841/disable-gzip-image-compression-in-fog-for-faster-image’][COLOR=#0581d2]Disable GZIP Image Compression in FOG for Faster Image Creation[/COLOR][/URL][/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR][/B][/SIZE]

[FONT=Helvetica Neue][COLOR=#333333]Recently I changed the software the imaging server at work uses from Clonezilla to FOG. There were many reasons for the change such as a better web interface, image deployment queue, etc however one of the main things I was looking forward to was storage nodes which allows for distribution of images across multiple servers to extend storage.

Deploying the FOG server was easy enough, however one of the first things I noticed was that image creation (uploading a new image to the server) was incredibly slow in comparison to image deployment. Image creation would take nearly 2 hours while image deployment would take about 25 minutes. This frustrated me to no end as we were doing this over gigabit and it wasn’t utilizing hardly any of the pipe on image creation. A quick glance at the screen told me why: FOG automatically assumes you want to GZIP the image. This means a smaller image, but a drastically increased image creation time since the system needs to compress the data it is sending.

I searched high and low through the config files for a way to disable GZIP compression, but found nothing. Eventually I figured out how to disable the compression, however doing so was not well documented at all. Enter this post which will hopefully help others solve the same problem I ran into.

Simply follow these steps (type these commands in your Linux terminal, you may need to be root or sudo to run some of these):

[FONT=Courier New]cp /tftpboot/fog/images/init.gz /tmp/init.gz
cd /tmp
gunzip init.gz
mkdir tmpMnt
mount -o loop /tmp/init /tmp/tmpMnt[/FONT]

Now using your favorite linux command line editor open the file /tmp/tmpMnt/bin/fog and find and replace all instances of -z1 with -z0. To do that with VIM do the following:

[FONT=Courier New]vim /tmp/tmpMnt/bin/fog
:%s/z1/z0/
:wq[/FONT]

Once you have replaced all -z1 with -z0 we need to recompress and replace your old init.gz file:

[FONT=Courier New]cd /tmp
umount /tmp/tmpMnt
gzip -9 init
cp /tftpboot/fog/images/init.gz /tftpboot/fog/images/init.gz.old
cp -f init.gz /tftpboot/fog/images/init.gz[/FONT]

Thats it. Now you have disabled compression upon image creation and you should notice a VERY large drop in image creation time! FOG does provide a script that assists in editing the init.gz file, HOWEVER the script requires you to have Nautilus installed (aka GNOME) and how many people really run a GUI on a server? Not many.[/COLOR][/FONT]

I just wanted to say thank you for the post. Have been all over looking for this answer, as I am new to both setting up a Ubuntu desktop as a Linux server and FOG. Really excited to start using FOG, great piece of software by the way, and give this school district an answer to cloning that doesn’t involve using deploy studio to clone a PC. Thank you again.

IF you are using SVN it is located in your svn repository
trunk/FOGCrypt

As of revision 1556 it can be downloaded via the client page
<FOGSERVERIP>/fog/client/

Mitigation for vulnerabilities, includes Windows XP.

[url]http://steve.grc.com/2014/04/28/a-quick-mitigation-for-internet-explorers-new-0-day-vulnerability/[/url]

Thanks. I may try that. I just found out dnsmasq (which is already running on another box) has pxe support built in, I’m trying that right now since I’m having trouble installing fog.

[quote=“Tom Elliott, post: 26277, member: 7271”]This is correct. If you’re having issues with image uploads, the only place to worry about is the Storage Management Page->All Storage Nodes-><YOUR STORAGE NODE>->Management Username and Passowrd. These should be set to the fog user’s information on the FOG Server’s linux user data.[/quote]

I know this is a very common source of frustration among FOG users. Could it be an idea to have this explained somewhere on screen after installation/upgrade?

Set the fog user password in GUI Change unix fog user password (passwd fog in linux terminal) Set password (same as point 2) in Storage Management Set ftp password (same as point 2 and 3) in FOG settings

I guess some frustration is solved with such a reminder.

btsync Secret for read only access is: B7AGQ6JVIP4MF5LCRL3XURQBYC53UIS25

[quote=“TechieDJ, post: 25970, member: 23829”]Must be something on my end with the schools web filtering or something. Just pasting in the direct link you gave in the browser ( [url]https://mastacontrola.com/fogboot/kernel/Kernel.CentOSBase.3.14.1.64[/url] ) worked fine. The old published kernels work on the fog configuration page but the new ones get download failed erros filesize=0. And if I just browse straight to [url]https://mastacontrola.com/fogboot/kernel/[/url] I see the same unpublished list but the download icons are ‘pagebreaks’ like they didnt load and cliking them ( [url]https://mastacontrola.com/fogboot/kernel/?node=about&sub=kernel&file=aHR0cHM6Ly9tYXN0YWNvbnRyb2xhLmNvbS9mb2dib290L2tlcm5lbC9LZXJuZWwuQ2VudE9TQmFzZS4zLjE0LjEuNjQ=[/url] )loads the same list but no file. All is good though, thanks for the quick reply! Much appreciated![/quote]

The reason for the “PAGE Breaks” is going to the link directly will present the index.php I’ve created to do the checking of what files. However, it’s only relevant to the FOG GUi, so the …/images/kernel.png file doesn’t exist at the direct link

Tom’s latest install instructions, with a few options on how to do it: [url]http://fogproject.org/forum/threads/fog-0-33b-now-considered-release-candidate.10331/#post-25806[/url]

fog is designed around deployment. it’s not really made to be a backup solution.