Daily / Weekly re-imaging grouped by IP
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Hi all,
I am looking at FOG to replace an ageing solution. I run IT for a company that provides training rooms, fitted with PCs etc, 1600 PCs in total. Each week, or sometimes each day, the rooms are imaged based on the client requirements for their courses. Each room runs on its own VLAN and IP Subnet.
PCs are also often moved about to different rooms. This is the issue.
What I need to be able to do is put images on PCs based on the IP that they have picked up from DHCP (as this changes based on which room they are in)… MAC address doesnt work as the machines are moved around.
For example, if we set up say room 1.03… the PCs will have IP 192.168.103.x and each of them will require an image based on the course that is being run the next day/week.
Any thoughts? is this possible? Is it something that would need some customization or coding… ?
Thanks in advance for any advice.
Cheers
Paul.
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as you have said they are all on their own VLAN’s & Subnets. So i guess they cannot all be seen by one location/subnet.
FOG’s not going to be able to puch to the machine with this level of secuirty. Now having a quick think I would look at running another network alongside your existing network. So you could use another VLAN but one that runs to evey room (one port) then put another switch under your current. you can then repatch the machines into your imaging VLAN to be processed. One complete, you put them back on their VLAN.
Thats a quick think, i’ll have another one
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Another quick one… Would work but your not going to do it…
Put two NICs in every machine & add the 2nd NIC to a FOG only network. -
Thanks… My issue is not the network side though, we have access lists etc and PXE / DHCP all working as it should from all VLANs back to the server (Ghost and LANDesk and FOG all working). I just need to be able to select which machines to put which image on based on which VLAN they are on at the time they boot to PXE (ie which IP they have)… This way we can send an image X to the machines in say room 1, which is always 192.168.1.10 to .255 … Room 2 is 192.168.2.10 - 255 etc etc…
Could do the groups by MAC but when our techs shuffle PCs around their would be too much work to change the groups with 1600 odd machines needing different images at least once a week. Maybe would need IP AND MAC… but getting tricky. Potentially will pay someone to write whatever is needed.
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I would look at my image & make it work for every room. how many images do you have. please give an example of a difference
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[FONT=Tahoma][COLOR=#141414]we have over 200 images… mostly provided by clients with their own settings, software etc etc we often dont know whats in the image until we receive it for testing.
another option we are thinking of is barcoding all of the PCs, and barcoding each room, and having a smart phone app that can scan the machines when they are put into the room, then scan the room number and have that imported. Potentially then running the image from the portable device also…
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Yeah moving computers around is not one of fog strong points. My guess is your will need to do some coding on fog, to get it working.
I know there is talk about how to address the moving PC around issue on the developers forum here
[url]http://fogproject.org/forum/threads/location-vs-hostname.122/[/url]You could probably make a script or something, you could run in the PXE boot menu, that will just look at the ip address that computer got, send it to fog and have fog automatically remove it from the last group and add it to the new group that is assigned to the IP range. Then send a re image task using the image assigned to the new group to the computer.
I am just talking out loud here, I really don’t know much about how the programing works in fog, I am more of a network guy.