FOG without PXE boot
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Hi All
I’m a Tech at a school and I use FOG to capture and deploy images to over 300 PC’s in various labs.
FOG works great for me as I manage a number of complex software packages along with dual boot Windows/Linux setups. I have FOG client running on the images and, using multicast, I can re image all of my labs with a click of a button in a short space of time.
I currently have control of the network in the labs as all PC’s sit behind a pfsense firewall that I manage.
However, in the future this is likely to change, so all PC’s (and the FOG server) will be on different subnets, getting address from a DHCP server on a network that I have no control over.
My question is, can I still run FOG without control over DHCP/PXE boot? and, if not, are there any similar alternatives?
My thoughts are that, without PXE boot, I will need to boot from USB media and point the PC to the FOG server but I’m not sure if this is possible.
Any thoughts or advice on this would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
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@psmith10 There is a great alternative for you that hardly anyone can keep you from using. It’s called proxyDHCP. The idea is that a DHCP server that cannot be modified does still hand out the IP information to the clients but as well another service sends another DHCP answer within the same second adding PXE boot information to the normal DHCP stuff. Pretty much all clients can handle this and are fairly happy to PXE boot this way.
Take a look at the wiki article: https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Using_FOG_with_an_unmodifiable_DHCP_server/_Using_FOG_with_no_DHCP_server
However, in the future this is likely to change, so all PC’s (and the FOG server) will be on different subnets
I am a bit more concerned about this. Cross-subnet communication needs to go through a router/firewall. Who will be in charge of that? It needs to allow a variety of protocols/ports (like TFTP, NFS, HTTP(S))…
Will all your clients be in the same subnet or will the 300 clients also be divided in different subnets? -
@Sebastian-Roth Many thanks for this. I should be able to request that the labs can sit common VLANS with no port restrictions between them. I guess this might cause problems with multi-casting but worst case I can have a FOG server on each subnet. I’m going to start testing! thanks