FOG Client side hostname input
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Hey guys,
I’m new to FOG and it seems to be perfect for what I’m looking for, just have a challenge here for you, hope you can help.
I want to deploy multiple images in a scenario where users change between PCs, all the PCs have the same hardware and they would just carry their SSD from PC to PC using a front panel hotswap.
The imaging part would be normal but my challenge is how to identify the user after since I’m not able to match the user to the mac address (for example).I see that the fog client has the ability to change the hostname of the machine, but in my case I don’t know yet who’s going to use that image/SSD.
Would you see a way where I would have a dropdown menu of a list of department/employee on the first time the OS boots? (Windows 10 in this case) Depending on the input by the user it would change the system hostname to something predefined by me and that could be seen in FOG gui after deployment. This way I would be able to identify that client in any PC he would be using.
Thanks in advance!
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@edition This isn’t really going to work the way you want to do it. FOG uses the MAC address to determine what hostname & other stuff to apply. With users carrying around disks, this just doesn’t work.
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@EditioN- Your scenario is really not that common (the disk swapping I mean) but maybe it can be done. But we need more details!
Multiple images, multiple user and multiple machines. This is actually pretty straight forward. It all depends on how deployment is done (users want to deploy the image on their own or admin is deploying it) and if images are user based or not (each user has a specific (set) of image(s) that need(s) to be deployed to different machines).
We are working towards a new way of identifying machines (FOG does not identify based on users) but this is still in a very early stage and does not use disk information for identification yet. As it would be a huge amount of work to add this we decided to go without disk identification but if you are really keen I could tell you about the details and we could work on adding this as well. But I’d ask you to help us implementing this. Let me know what you think.
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Hi,
Thank you for your quick replies and I appreciate your help!
Yup, I agree, is not a very common case, I will try to explain the process better.
The idea is to use this in esports events, we would receive X amount of computers, all with the same hardware and all with a SSD inside.
- Before hand we, admins, would do the image deployment in all the computers/SSDs.
- After the image being deployed we would remove the SSD from the computer.
- These SSDs are now sorted and randomly assigned to each player which will keep it and use it in different locations/PCs
All good here, the goal now is that we want to easily be able to identify where is each player, IP and PC, by their team/nickname. This will help us as well to have some kind of PC monitoring and making sure the hardware is working as expected.
The only way I see this working is if on the first boot after imaging there is user side input to choose who they are and for that info to be sent to FOG. This means that the PC from that moment most be tracked by disk information or some other variable which is different from client to client. Since the MAC address will change.
Would be interesting to have this feature and I’m keen to help in any way possible.
Cheers.
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@edition What’s the end goal you want to accomplish with fog in this scenario? If it’s just hostnames - and you’re already kicking around the idea of a user identifying themselves as mandatory - make setting the hostname mandatory too and be done with it.