Deploy and capture images remotely?
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I’m new to fog. We are currently using acronis and it’s become a pain by booting to USB, and saving an image to an external.
My question is, if I put a fog server in our datacenter, can I remotely image PCS and capture images? Is option 66/67 required at each location to boot to PXE or is there another option? Our datacenter is at a total different locations and our techs all work from home so I don’t want to setup a million VPNs. What’s the best option for us to manage and deploy remotely?
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@gaemover9 I don’t understand what the question is about.
Option 66/67 tells your machines where to look for PXE and what file to load from the Server.
Each location being different - that’s fine, each location would need to point at the 66/67 appropriately for that “location” to work properly.
The whole point of FOG is to us network booting to image devices. Because FOG uses a GUI web based interface, technically it can be “done remotely”.
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how would I deploy it remotely where the fog server is if I have to use PXE
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@gaemover9 There’s loads of documentation and methodologies.
You deploy it on site. All other things should have access from your routers/switches to access and relay the information.
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Some of these locations don’t have a server or a router we have access to do deploy option 66/67. IT appears we have to PXE boot which wont work across an internet connectioni.
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@gaemover9 said in Deploy and capture images remotely?:
Some of these locations don’t have a server or a router we have access to do deploy option 66/67. IT appears we have to PXE boot which wont work across an internet…
Fog may not be the right tool for you then. When fog was created it used internal only protocols that are not secure enough to run across the internet natively.
You can pxe boot into fog over a vpn connection but typically the image transfer of your golden image would flood out the vpn connection. Consider that your golden image is probably 25GB in size and trying to move that over a remote connection may take a while.
Now some of these location that don’t have servers or a router. How many computers that would need to be imaged are at this location? A fog mobile deployment server could be a circa 2018 dual core laptop. A fog server doesn’t require a high performance server. I’ve used a raspberry pi 4 as a mobile deployment server for a < 5 target computer environment. At today’s prices for a RPI its cheaper to use an old laptop, but a RPI will work.
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@george1421 This is a good idea. How would this work on a raspberry pi? It would be a stand alone fog server? You store the image on the pi?
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@gaemover9 Yes and yes. In my case to avoid burning out the SD card, I put a usb3 to sata adapter with the PI and then used a small SSD drive to hold the images. So it was raspbian, create the ./images directory, mount the flash drive over /images, then install FOG. An older laptop would give better utility, but a RPI will work for < 10 workstation site.
Once FOG was installed then you would install dnsmasq to provide pxe boot information for the remote site. This way when the fog server is powered off, no pxe boot info is sent to the site. You might do this with a mobile FOG deployment server that would be shipped from site to site so you don’t need to configure dhcp with pxe boot info. Many SoHo routers get this process wrong.
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@george1421 how would it be mobile if you still need to access the DHCP server to set option 66/67 ?
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@gaemover9 The “mobile server” would provide DHCP
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@gaemover9 said in Deploy and capture images remotely?:
how would it be mobile if you still need to access the DHCP server to set option 66/67
Actually what I was thinking but did not communicate the intent, is to have dnsmasq configured in a proxy dhcp mode, where it would only provide pxe boot info and the main dhcp server would remain untouched. The advantage here is that no fog server == no pxe boot info.
The other thing I didn’t mention when we are talking about a mobile fog server is that FOG doesn’t like to have its IP address changed after FOG is installed. One of the mods created a script where it reconfigures FOG based on the current IP address of the FOG server. That way you can drop in a mobile deployment server, it picks up a dhcp address and then the script runs to reconfigure fog and dnsmasq to use the newly acquired dhcp address. Its not a flawless configuration but it does work.
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@george1421 That’s what I am looking for… What guides do I need to follow and where is the script? It would stay DHCP so I can use it anywhere
