Why does FOG need a DNS server?
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Please excuse my ignorance as I am fairly new to servers/networking in general, but why would FOG need a DNS server if it’s set up for just local imaging? Isn’t it just assigning MAC addresses to IP via DHCP and pushing the image that way? Why would FOG need to translate IPs into domain names and vice versa? Is it for the FOG dashboard maybe?
Thanks all!
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FOG only needs DNS if your fog server and target computers are on an isolated imaging network and the FOG server is acting as the dhcp server for the local imaging network. If you are integrating FOG into your existing business network then the DNS value doesn’t matter, you can just press enter to bypass it.
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@george1421 Thanks for the reply! That info is helpful. I am currently integrating a separate FOG server at my work. The first one was set up by someone who doesn’t work here anymore and it has a DNS server.
But even if FOG is on an isolated imaging network, I’m still struggling to understand why DNS would matter? What would it possibly need DNS translations for?
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@danieln The fog server will reach out to the target computers to see if its up or down and display the status in the hosts view. It references the target computer (when looking for it) by the name you registered the computer in FOG. It has to translate that name to an IP address, that is why I needs to know DNS.
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@george1421 Interesting. Thank you for that info. I have only ever done Quick Registration with FOG which seems to identify and register the hosts by their MAC addresses. I figured since FOG was handling DHCP and assigning IPs to MAC addresses anyways (is this even how it works?), it wouldn’t need DNS.
So it uses the MAC addresses as a DNS name?
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@danieln The DNS IP the FOG installer asks about is only ever used when you let FOG setup the DHCP stuff for you. It is used to hand the DNS server IP to all the clients when booting. It’s just what pretty much any DHCP server does, tell clients where the default gateway and DNS server is.