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Hi everyone I am a big fan of FOG and have had a great time playing around with it and find it fairly easy to work with even though I have no background in Linux thanks to these awesome forums. But I now have a question I would like to pose. We have been using FOG for a little over a year now. There a many different locations within the organization but right now we only image at the main location. The network ability is not enough to push an image to our remote sites. I want to deploy storage nodes and or NFS file shares to give us the ability to image at every location. So now my questions.
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When imaging from a storage node I know it downloads the boot file from the fog server. is that all the network resources it would take? Or does it still pull the image from the fog server along with the storage node?
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If I setup a NFS does it act completely the same as a storage node?
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is there possible another option I could look at?
Thanks in advance for any input.
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[quote=“nickd5009, post: 10046, member: 2405”]Hi everyone I am a big fan of FOG and have had a great time playing around with it and find it fairly easy to work with even though I have no background in Linux thanks to these awesome forums. But I now have a question I would like to pose. We have been using FOG for a little over a year now. There a many different locations within the organization but right now we only image at the main location. The network ability is not enough to push an image to our remote sites. I want to deploy storage nodes and or NFS file shares to give us the ability to image at every location. So now my questions.
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When imaging from a storage node I know it downloads the boot file from the fog server. is that all the network resources it would take? Or does it still pull the image from the fog server along with the storage node?
-
If I setup a NFS does it act completely the same as a storage node?
-
is there possible another option I could look at?
Thanks in advance for any input.[/quote]
I faced that same issue about 2 years ago now, i ended up deploying standalone fog servers at each location on cheap HW. I use filezilla to transfer updated images to them, i thought it was going to be a pain to management them all but it’s been great for me and the Level 1 & 2 guys
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[quote=“The Dealman, post: 10049, member: 53”]I faced that same issue about 2 years ago now, i ended up deploying standalone fog servers at each location on cheap HW. I use filezilla to transfer updated images to them, i thought it was going to be a pain to management them all but it’s been great for me and the Level 1 & 2 guys[/quote]
Thanks for the feed back I think that is what I will look at but have 60 locations with very slow speeds so updating image will take some time and then the hardware might be an issue.
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+1 for standalone fog servers. We tried the multisite patch which worked a treat initially but as we have different OU’s for each site in AD it was actually simpler to set each site up with it’s own fogserver. AD integration then drops each sites pc into the relevant OU automatically,
Depending on the size of each site the hardware doesn’t need to be over the top - we were running quite happily with an IBM M52 running I think a P4 and 512MB and it was absolutely fine for sites ranging from 6 to 40 users. If you have a slow link to the remote sites I would imagine you a standalone server at each site would be the preferred option. You copy (rsync, scp whatever) the base image to your remote server(s) and the deployment is then done on the LAN not the WAN.
Yes updating 60 sites will be a pain initially (especially if you update the images regularly) but the benefits of being able to deploy images, wake up hosts, virus check, wipe, deploy snapins the list goes on - are all worth the initial setup effort.
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We run 50 sites with FOG, and do them as standalone, but with special scripts.
I’ve modified FOG to automatically deploy machine specific drivers post boot, and we sync those driver repositories, and our standard image using rsync.
FOG is so easy to build that it’s no big deal to deploy it everywhere on a VM.
