What is the PROPER Process for this?

[tneuber]

I have 24 laptops that travel for the company I work for. We host educational meetings around the US, and they all get shipped out roughly 2 times a month.

My old process just grabbed a laptop, run updates, then run a fog capture on it (NOTHING ELSE. No special commands run to ‘clean up’ the image or anything).

Am I doing this right? Should I be running Sysprep after every time? I Don’t want to have to go through the whole setup process of a laptop every time I do windows updates for 24 of them.

I’ve also noticed, after deploying an image to the laptops, the Office 2016 install needs to be ‘activated’ and the computer is technically in the domain and can access some network resources like network drives, but if you try to login with a domain account it says “The security database on the server does not have a computer account for this workstation trust relationship”.

What am I doing wrong? Surely there has to be the ‘right’ way to do imaging so I wouldn’t have to go through all these steps EVERY time I image a computer.

[Sebastian Roth]

@tneuber said in What is the PROPER Process for this?:

computer is technically in the domain and can access some network resources like network drives, but if you try to login with a domain account it says “The security database on the server does not have a computer account for this workstation trust relationship”.

Is your master you take the image from being unjoined from the domain before capture? Do you use the fog-client software together with the FOG server? This would help to properly join the domain after those have been deployed.

[tneuber]

@Sebastian-Roth No, I didn’t remove it from the domain but could.

I’ve installed the fog-client on PC’s before but don’t see it do anything other than report the last time the computer was ‘online/pingable’ in the fog dashboard.

What’s the process to use the fog-client?

1)install fog-client on the master
2)remove from domain
3)set domain join in the fog dashboard for that image?
4)image a new laptop?

It should, in theory, join the domain then correct?

[george1421]

How are you managing images on these computers? Is it one fog image per computer or one fog image for many computers?

For me I would go about it a bit differently. I would create one golden image, sysprep it and then capture with FOG. This golden image would NOT EVER be connected to a domain before being sysprep’d. The golden image would have all of the programs and settings baked in that you would need. I would either have your unattend.xml script saved in the golden image or the FOG client connect the target computer to the domain after OOBE is done running on the target computer.

If you have many computer models I would (before deployment) create a FOG Post install script to copy the necessary drivers over to the target computer after FOG has downloaded the disk to the computer. That way you can have a single (golden) image for many target computers.

[tneuber]

@george1421 said in What is the PROPER Process for this?:

All of the travel laptops are the same model (we bought them at the same time). I’ve never heard of the unnattendad.xml thing? is there more information on that somewhere for fog?

[george1421]

@tneuber The unattend.xml thing, is a windows thing and not a fog thing.

For example I don’t use the FOG client in my environment but I use the unattend.xml file to configure the target computer and connect it to AD. Here is an example of a sanitized version of my unattend.xml file: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/11920/windows-10-1803-sysprep-problem/7