Best Process for Imaging with USB Nic's

[Derek Newbold]

Hi,

We are looking to purchase some Dell Latitude 3180 laptops that do not have inbuilt NIC’s. We have a trial of the device and they also sent a Dell USB NIC that supports PXE boot. From our testing the MAC address recognised by FOG unfortunately comes from the USB which means it will follow the USB NIC rather than the laptop itself. Dell are now doing a USB-C device that allows MAC address passthrough which would hopefully resolve this type of issue, however these particular devices that we are going to purchase do not have that option.

I’ve thought of setting up dummy hosts based on the MAC address of the USB NIC’s and then if we want to reimage something then just grab a USB NIC and tell that one in FOG to reimage. However what happens then when we want the device to boot up into Windows and to rename and join the domain? How will the FOG client reference the machine once the USB NIC is removed? I thought it might be able to reference it by Wireless MAC address however to join our wireless the laptop needs to be a part of the domain and to be already named correctly etc.

I’m wondering if anyone could explain a simple step by step solution of the best process for imaging with USB NIC’s? I’ve tried to read some other forum posts however the results weren’t overly clear to me.

Any help would be much appreciated!

FOG Version: 1.4.3
SVN Revision: 6075

Thanks,

Derek

[Sebastian Roth]

@Derek-Newbold We don’t have an easy step by step guide ready yet and I don’t find the time to create one right now. Though I ask you to give it a go and please report back if and how you could make it work. Be part of the community!

Here are some important pointers you need:

• We introduced recognizing systems via something called SysUUID not long ago. That would get rid of the adapter being bound to a device. But as this is still very new we haven’t got this all fixed up yet. But hey, we got to get started…
• Upgrade your FOG server (or build a new one for testing this) using the working branch from our git repostitory - with that you have the important commit that added the feature
• Play with it and see if it works for you…
• Let us know what works and what not so we can keep improving this feature!

Edit: Removed the link to the patched init.xz as it’s in the official binaries now…

[Tom Elliott]

@sebastian-roth said in Best Process for Imaging with USB Nic's:

Download the patched init.xz here to set the UUID in the inventory DB table when registering a client from the FOG menu (this step will be gone very soon)

This portion is no longer needed. Installing the “working” will get you the patched init’s now.

[Sebastian Roth]

@Derek-Newbold I am marking this solved as we haven’t heard back from you in a while an I expect you’ve figured things out by now. Feel free to post again if you still need help on this.