Does the fog client service check for pending tasks for all MACs, or just the active one?

[nengelhardt]

the client reports all available mac addresses when checking for tasks. this means that, typically, the registered mac is sent with the pending tasks check whether it’s the one being used to connect to the network or not.

That’s what I was wondering. Thank you.

[Trevelyan]

@Joseph-Hales

Actually - even if the MACs are pending, they are still used even if unapproved. This is a huge problem with VMWare adapter addresses.

For example: if a host has a pending mac address of 00:50:9c:00:08 and then another host notices it has that same mac address, it will associate itself with that host, adding its own mac address to that host and renaming itself, if hostname changer is enabled.

Last week was spend unbrokening many broken PCs

[Wayne Workman]

@Trevelyan said:

@Joseph-Hales

Actually - even if the MACs are pending, they are still used even if unapproved. This is a huge problem with VMWare adapter addresses.

For example: if a host has a pending mac address of 00:50:9c:00:08 and then another host notices it has that same mac address, it will associate itself with that host, adding its own mac address to that host and renaming itself, if hostname changer is enabled.

Last week was spend unbrokening many broken PCs

wowzers… that sucks.

What aer the advantages of building images in VMWare? I know that some people do it but I never understood why… just because you can??

I maintain an image for every model in my building, and I build those images on the physical machines they are destined for… even though I have access to good Hyper-V resources.

[nengelhardt]

What aer the advantages of building images in VMWare? I know that some people do it but I never understood why… just because you can??

The main advantage, and why I do it, is because you can take a snapshot BEFORE you run sysprep, so that if something is wrong with your unattended file, or you want to update the image and sysprep it again, you can as many times as you want by reverting back to that snapshot. If you don’t, you are limited to sysprepping 3 times per windows installation. It took me a few times to get my unattended.xml right, and being able to update once, push for all is big. My actual method is to build the image, with all the software, in VirtualBox, in audit mode. Then I sysprep /generalize /audit to sysprep it and have it go back into audit mode. Then I upload it to fog from the VM and download it to a physical machine in my office. I boot that one up (into audit mode) and install all the drivers I need, then sysprep again with the answer file “sysprep /oobe /generalize /unattend:unattended.xml” and upload, then multicast to the rest of the physical machines.

[Wayne Workman]

@nengelhardt

I don’t sysprep… However, on that same note… my co-worker was messing around with Windows Deployment Services which requires sys-prep.

I remember him getting aggravated about the 3 reboot limit thing… I told him, ok build the image over again… and we will just upload it to FOG for safe keeping. If you need to restart, we can restore it (THEN) in 15 minutes.

And now, we’ve ditched WDS in favor of FOG, and because of the awesome compression and upload / download times in FOG Trunk, we often find ourselves doing a pre-upload of images lol… Uploading what we have before we do something risky that you can’t come back from cleanly.

Once we verify that what we did works, we delete the early image of course. But, we have reverted to early images a few times.

[Junkhacker]

@Trevelyan said:

@Joseph-Hales

Actually - even if the MACs are pending, they are still used even if unapproved. This is a huge problem with VMWare adapter addresses.

For example: if a host has a pending mac address of 00:50:9c:00:08 and then another host notices it has that same mac address, it will associate itself with that host, adding its own mac address to that host and renaming itself, if hostname changer is enabled.

Last week was spend unbrokening many broken PCs

that sounds like a bug, as that is not the intended operation. did you notify anyone about it (other than this post)?

[Tom Elliott]

@Junkhacker he has reported it and I am looking into it as we speak.

[Wayne Workman]

@Junkhacker Another guy made a thread about it, too… https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/5284/bug-pending-mac-addresses-being-used-and-not-being-approved-and-broken-filter

[Trevelyan]

@Wayne-Workman

Same guy

[Wayne Workman]

@Trevelyan Oh lol…

[nengelhardt]

@Wayne-Workman said:

@nengelhardt

I don’t sysprep… However, on that same note… my co-worker was messing around with Windows Deployment Services which requires sys-prep.

I remember him getting aggravated about the 3 reboot limit thing… I told him, ok build the image over again… and we will just upload it to FOG for safe keeping. If you need to restart, we can restore it (THEN) in 15 minutes.

And now, we’ve ditched WDS in favor of FOG, and because of the awesome compression and upload / download times in FOG Trunk, we often find ourselves doing a pre-upload of images lol… Uploading what we have before we do something risky that you can’t come back from cleanly.

Once we verify that what we did works, we delete the early image of course. But, we have reverted to early images a few times.

Yeah, I found the speed difference in snapshot vs. upload is well worth building it in a VM, but I suppose if that’s your style then go ahead.