Fog without wired network
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As we have been fogging our school’s laptops we have found several that do not have a working wired NIC. Is there anyway to Fog a laptop over a wireless connection? I know there may be a performance issue, but with less than 10 laptops we should be able to knock them off in a day or two.
Fog 1.2
Windows 7
Ubuntu 12.04LTS server -
There aren’t standards in PXE for Wifi that make this feasible. I know apple offers some “wireless netboot” capabilities, but that won’t help you.
Even if it was possible, I question the performance, reliability, and efficiency of using this method. I don’t see how this would offer any significant advantages over wired connections.
I know you said that your nics are bad, in which case I would look into a usb option.
It would take a significant amount of time to image this way, it would probably be unreliable, and it would ruin the performance of the wireless network for everybody else at the same time.
I know it’s not the answer you’re looking for, but I felt is necessary to explain that it’s not FOG’s fault you can’t image wirelessly, its the PXE standards.
NOW iPXE is a whole different animal. It supports the capability… but… see my statements above.
We have started to work in some iPXE into FOG and we are ironing out the bugs, but I don’t really see the benefit to imaging wirelessly as I stated above.
We (the development team) are having enough trouble trying to serve all the possibilities of NIC there are, We’ve had to create multiple bootfiles just to serve some variants of NIC, and until we can get those issues resolved, I don’t see this being added to the plate anytime soon.
Now don’t let that deter you. FOG is opensource and you are welcome to tweak till your eyes bleed, and in doing so you may even create a document explaining the process, others may also benefit.
Most of the elements should be there, I know we are serving NFS, HTTP, HTTPS, iSCS, DNS, TFTP, AoE, VLAN, SRP, bzImage, MBOOT, ELF, PXE, XEXT
Just look at [url]http://www.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/IPXE#What_is_iPXE.3F[/url]
The page above also states the differences in the boot files so you get a better understanding.
It’s just a matter of figuring out what would be necessary to complete your project
[QUOTE][B]Unlike a traditional PXE ROM, iPXE is able to boot over a wide area network such as the Internet. If the machine you are testing is connected to the Internet, you can boot the iPXE[/B][/QUOTE]
source: [url]http://ipxe.org/[/url]
This guy has a way of completing what you are asking, I’m sure it can be doctored to look at FOG
[url]http://www.rmprepusb.com/tutorials/ipxe[/url]Best of luck, and Godspeed!
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I was afraid of that. The good thing is that the laptops are under warranty so I can get the NIC’s fixed. so in the end things will work out. I think it is a good plan to NOT to worry about iPXE and wifi. Keep the core product working as it does and in the end outliers will find other methods.
Mark
