First time FOG user needs help
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I’m trying to understand how FOG works in comparison to WDS. My main goals are:
- Be able to live boot ubuntu/debian/kali
- Be able to live boot Hirens PE (Windows version)
- Be able to install all flavors of Windows 7, and 10 onto new computers.
- Have a menu for being able to access 1-3 upon pxe boot.
- All this needs to work in x86/64 bios and uefi.
I’m used to just uploading a couple .wim files and it’s stored on the WDS server. I don’t see a place where I can upload .wim or .iso, or anything. I looked at a lengthy tutorial on youtube and some guy basically completely installed windows, and registered it into the fog server via pxe, then uploaded that entire disk to the fog server. I hope this isn’t the only way to upload an image to FOG.
Thanks.
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@elementalwindx said in First time FOG user needs help:
I’m used to just uploading a couple .wim files
Well we were spot on until I hit this line. WIM files are windows only (there are wim file readers for linux but they are not as efficient as Partclone that FOG uses). To use FOG you need to capture your reference image with FOG if you want to deploy with FOG.
The core differences between MDT/WDS and FOG is that FOG is a (disk) block level cloning tool where MDT/WDS is a file level cloning tool. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Generally block level cloning is faster than file level cloning. For reference I can push out a 25GB fat image to a target computer is under 4 minutes. Or to say it another way I can go from a bare metal system to a computer running windows setup/oobe is about 6 minutes. Then depending on the system OOBE runs for about 11-16 minutes. So roughly more or less 20 minutes from bare metal to a workstation ready to move to the user’s desk. Try doing that with MDT/WDS or SCCM. Understand there is a lot going on here outside of FOG (which is involved with imaging for only 4 minutes of the 20)
I have a tutorial that shows how to boot most other OS kickstart images (ISO). There ARE posts in the FOG forum that show how to boot Hirens iso images too. For your windows deployment its best to build a golden image and deploy that instead of trying to load windows setup via fog (which can be done). The rest of your requirements are already built into FOG’s base code.
ref: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/10944/using-fog-to-pxe-boot-into-your-favorite-installer-images
