Presenting On FOG at conference?

[fry_p]

Hi All,
My boss and I have been mulling around an idea to put on a presentation on FOG at a conference in Ohio called Brainstorm k20 next year.

I think it would be beneficial especially for the k12 conference goers. Us k12 folks are always short on the budget and we look for products that just work. I believe FOG fits both categories since it is open-source, free, has great support on the forums, and you don’t need a degree in Microsoft Deployment or SCCM to use it.
We are thinking of going over the basics and offering a VM Template to the audience for them to spin up a VM and provide instructions on how to change the IP/set up the DHCP options/configure their networks for FOG.

I wanted to run it by you guys to see if you have any tips or things you think I should go over? This is still in the very early stages of planning as it will take place possibly in May of 2020.

If anyone has input, I’d greatly appreciate it. I want to spread the good word of FOG to my cohorts but also do it right!

Thanks!

[onenerdyguy]

Always a good thing to do, honestly.

I’ve presented at the Wisconsin Brainstorm a few times, before I left education, and think this will be a good one to do. However, one thing to expect is that you’ll be scheduled on the last day of the conference, hopefully before lunch but probably after, and attendance will be minimal.

Linux and it’s usages still doesn’t have a huge foothold in Education outside of chromebooks and the like, and the interest in it shows.

The last technical one I did there included Fog, Ansible, and OPSI in the same session. I gave an overview of all of them, and had a demo environment where we spun up the fog server using Ansible, created a Windows (7 at the time) client vm, sysprepped and captured it, deployed it, then used Opsi to push apps to it. Giving them the whole stack was great, and got great reviews.

[Wayne Workman]

Sounds like a cool idea. Of course you know there’s steps in the wiki for changing IPs, and also the tool that does it for you. I don’t know what the event looks like, but maybe you can record your presentation and put it on YouTube.

[fry_p]

@onenerdyguy that sounds like quite a presentation! We would probably just stick to FOG and showing how we use it at our district. There are different methods (Golden image vs. model specific/sysprep or not, etc). Our goal would be to give them the foundation of it all and refer them to resources such as these wonderful forums and certain wiki pages to give them the tools to make informed decisions on what is best for their environment.

When I went to Brainstorm Ohio last year, it was abandoned on the final afternoon, so I get that completely. Luckily last year the only thing after lunch was a few round table discussions. Hopefully if this happens, we at least get the morning slot of the final day.

@Wayne-Workman Yep, I was thinking of providing the script for the most ease. All you need to do is change the IP of the server and run the script right? This is the one I know of: https://github.com/FOGProject/fog-community-scripts/tree/master/updateIP

As for recording it, I love that idea! Just know this is far off and currently theoretical. I probably posted this way too early. If we do get a slot I don’t see a problem in recording it.

[Wayne Workman]

@fry_p That’s the one, and awesome.

[Joe Gill]

@fry_p

I was recently asked to give a presentation on FOG by one of the State tech groups (in education) I am involved with in Montana. We have a strong Linux / Mac community here. They are very open source driven and many of the districts here use FOG. Many would like to make the jump into FOG but haven’t taken the leap. I may end up giving a talk here this summer.

I like the idea of setting up a server on a VM. Creating a host image and pushing said image to a new host.

Off topic – At a recent event one of the presenters did a presentation on PFSense. He actually set things up from the ground up. That’s how the conversation arose for me to do the same thing but only with FOG at the State conference.

Good luck!

[george1421]

@Joe-Gill said in Presenting On FOG at conference?:

I may end up giving a talk here this summer

If you really want to impress them (with at least the possibilities) take a Raspberry Pi3 and make a fog server out of that. Understand you are not going to have blinding fast deployments. But for a demo deployment it will work very nicely. The point being that fog doesn’t need a real powerful server for image deployment since all of the heavy lifting is done by the target computer. If you also installed dnsmasq and Wyane’s auto FOG reconfigure script script you could create a mobile FOG deployment server out of that Pi. Just bring it to a client network, boot it and then pxe boot the target computers into fog

[Joe Gill]

@george1421

I like it!! It’s a heck of an idea.

[george1421]

@Joe-Gill FWIW: I have a Pi3 at home with FOG 1.4.4 installed on it. I haven’t tried 1.5.x series yet since the new GUI has a bit heavier CPU requirements. Its more of a trade show novelty, but it does work well. I happen to have Raspbian installed without the gui.

[Wayne Workman]

@george1421 said in Presenting On FOG at conference?:

I happen to have Raspbian installed without the gui.

We all know that’s the only way.

[Metrinity]

I think that very great will be to organize some team-building activities. In this way, the workers will know each other better. Recently, I participated in a similar activity organized by. I had a lot of fun. Also, I expanded my network with a lot of new people. It’s also very relaxing and helping people to strengthen some abilities. Also, I’ve learned how important is to know how to talk in front of people. From my point of view, such activities will bring only pluses to a big company.

[Metrinity]

I can say that this idea it’s pretty good. I think in this way you could earn only advantages. It would be hard for me to think about such an idea. LOL. Also, I could advise you to try some team-building games at the conference. In this way, you could make the conference more interesting. On another hand, people will make new friends and will strengthen their communicating skills. We had a similar event in our company organized by team-building. In this way, I overcome my problem of speaking in front of people.