Am I cloning the image?
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Hello all,
I have recently installed FOG and intend to use it in our production environment as soon as possible.
We have a collection of Gateway laptops all running Windows XP that need to be identical. We have one laptop already configured will all the applications we plan to install. Now we just need to clone the image and deploy it.
So far, we have not been able to clone the image at all. I have an active task running that is (I think) running. I cannot really tell because there is no progress update or status bar for the task.
I have the Gateway laptop plugged directly into the FOG server via ethernet cable.
I don’t know what to do next and I would appreciate any help you can offer.
Thank you!
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Directly into the server or on the same switch/router as the server is connected to?
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@Tom-Elliott we have tried both, but currently it is directly plugged into the server.
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@FLHS What’s providing DHCP? The cable between the server and the host is a cross over cable?
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Just to be clear FOG does not magically talk to target computers. There is a complex dance of technologies that work together to make a FOG capture/deployment a success.
Once your fog server is setup you need to modify your dhcp server to provide the FOG information to your target computers. This is typically done by setting dhcp options 66 {next-server} to the IP address of the fog server (which should be a static IP address) and dhcp option 67 {boot-file} to undionly.kpxe for bios (legacy) target computers and ipxe.efi for uefi based target computers.Once dhcp is setup then you pxe (network) boot the target computer. If everything goes well you should see the FOG iPXE boot menu. At the iPXE boot menu you select register device and register the target computer with FOG. After that you can go into the fog web gui and find the device you just registered and schedule a capture task for your mother or golden image. Then pxe (network) boot your golden image computer once more and then FOG should automatically start to capture the hard drive setting.
I skipped over a few steps but that is the general outline of what needs to be done.
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@Tom-Elliott does it need to be a cross over cable? We are just using an ether net cable.
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@FLHS typically if you’re connecting two like devices together, nic to another nic rather than nic to switch, a crossover is what will provide a link to both NICs. This doesn’t mean you will get dhcp as something has to provide it. Most times when I see use in how you’re describing the connection both are setup with static IP.
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@FLHS If you want to direct connect two computers directly together than yes you must use a cross over cable. Understand in this configuration your FOG server must provide dhcp services, in addition to the other normal FOG pxe services. While this is a non-standard setup it will work as you ask. For the FOG server, it must use a static IP address on this interface. The target computer will use dhcp assigned IP address (required because the pxe boot data is sent via dhcp)
I do have to say my intuition is telling me you are doing something non-standard with fog (such as using it as a disaster recovery backup service). If that is the case there may be a better solution than fog. I do have to say that FOG is a complex combination of services. If you are using FOG as a DR backup tool, then clonezilla may be a better tool since it can boot from usb flash and save to a usb attached hard drive.
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Tom and George are correct. Nic to Nic requires a crossover cable - anything else simply wouldn’t work at all.