Persistent Tasks

[mrcollin101]

Hi all,

I wanted to see if anyone has any suggestions of how to set up a FOG server that will meet our setup needs. We have a VLAN that is set up with a Virtual FOG 1.3.0 server on it that is going to be dedicated to just imagine our rental computers for our clients. The workflow is;

*Client rents computer
*General staff(Non-IT) goes to storage where the computer is and grabs it off a dock, where it is hard lined into our VLAN that has DHCP reservations for each computer. Once it is undocked it is then automatically connected to the guest net and is unreachable through our internal IT network(for security reasons we have PCI in this location)
*Delivers to client who will have full admin access on computer
*Staff Retrieves from client after allotted time, usually several days, and places on the dock
*Staff restarts computer that is set to boot to 1)NIC 2)Internal HDD

This is where the problem arises, I need a task in FOG that is persistently waiting for that action to occur. With Cron scheduling, the task will be created every night the computer is not on the network and the tasks will build. Also, if the computer is rented in the morning, docked, and then rented in the evening before the Cron task is scheduled it will not be imaged on the dock. any help is appreciated, we are not against a different software solution for this task, but we have FOG already and like its reliability.

[george1421]

This is a slight alternative if you updated your workflow.

When the computer is checked back in and placed in the dock.
The staff member would boot the computer up in the dock and either press F12 to get to the boot menu and select network to reach the fog menu (or based on the boot order it would boot to the FOG Menu right away). Once at the fog menu the staff member would pick quick image (or what ever its called now). Then fog will lay down the image. There is no need to touch the web console. I’d have to check but I think we can even set the quick image feature as a default FOG Menu option. In FOG 1.4.0 (soon to be released) there is an option to limit the quick image menu to only display the image you defined for that host system. Today it will list all images defined in the FOG environment.

There is another option that may take a little hacking (very little). When you schedule an image deployment FOG creates a task for this. At the very end of the image deployment the target computer checks back into the fog server and tells it “I’m all done”. When the fog server gets the “I’m all done” signal it will remove the task from the list. If that “I’m all done” signal is not sent by the target computer the task will remain in the queue. Someone with little computing skills could make this change to the inits to disable this signal. I’m not in favor of this route, but it is possible to do without much effort.