FOG Newbie, help with MAC addresses please?
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Hi there, im just starting out with FOG, and am impressed so far!
I have it set up and working fine, but I have a question thats probably been answered elsewhere!
Do I have to explicitly define the machine to be imaged MAC address? ie, on Symantec Ghost (Got too expensive!) you can use a wildcard (??:??:??:??:??:??) so that any machine that received an IP Address was booted into the boot image. Can we do that with FOG?
I have FOG installed on my laptop, and I have an 8 port switch, making a small isolated network. I just want to try and pull the image from a laptop. I will be going across all my sites using this setup, so avoiding using MAC addresses would be great.
Sorry if this isnt clear, getting your thoughts on screen isnt easy!
Matt
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Fog primarily uses Mac Addresses. We have ditched ghost and gone with FOG
because its FREE!
you can get the mac by turning on boot to NIC in your bios then when you select it from the boot menu it comes with up boot to dhcp and your mac address, press pause / break on your keyboard and you then have chance to write it down. Once its in fog and your ready you can hit the spacebar and it will boot from pxe on the same screen.
hope this helps
Lee
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OK, i dont mind doing that to pull an image, but say i wanted to deploy to 40 laptops at once, would I have to go through each laptop putting its MAC address into FOG?
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Im afraid so, you need the mac’s else how will it know what to ghost.
You can’t go by computer name, it has to be mac, but once it is in FOG you can clone them as many times as you need
thanks
Lee
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I suppose when its free you cant complain, and it does so much more than Ghost!
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I’m pretty new at this, and actually haven’t done a multicast yet, but this is how I think I would do it concerning your setup and how you want to use fog…
Assuming you have your image on your server/laptop, you can then connect your small 8 PC network up. Get all the PCs hooked up, and have them boot to network+PXE. Spam a key (i usually hit space) and it will find and boot into the FOG screen. Do the full system inventory. When it asks for a PC name, you can either name it so its easier to identify, or leave it blank. If you leave it blank, its name in the fog host table will be its MAC address. Then tell it the image ID, and OS ID, and then skip the rest, and then select not to image now. It will auto restart the PC after sending its inventory information. At the BIOS screen/POST turn off the PC. After you’ve done this to all 8 PCs, you can then select them all in fog (host section, all hosts) and multicast the image to them as a task. (add them to a group). Then, after that, delete them all out of FOG and start the next group of 8 computers.
This would probably be faster than individually finding and adding all the MAC address by hand…
You also don’t have to multicast if your switch wont support it. If this is the case, just allow it to image on reboot, and dont skip the imagining.
-SMoRZ3
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There are customizations to Fog which allow you to image without registering a computer. You boot to PXE, select from the menu and pick an image. These customizations are not officially supported, but they are available and the Fog community will do whatever we can to help you get it working.
I can’t remember if it’s on the WIKI or on the Forums, but someone has posted how to make Fog image without registering all the hosts beforehand.
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I believe [URL=‘http://www.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/Bypass_Host_Registration’]THIS[/URL] is what you’re talking to Chad…