Can Fog do this....?
-
I’m trying to help my local school system round up a bunch of laptops for the upcoming school year. We plan on doing drives where people will bring us their old laptops to be refurbished.
So, in a perfect world, I’d like to have a Fog server set up on an independent, basic network. Plug in a random laptop and after pxe booting, have Fog wipe the drive and install a linux image.
Can I set up Fog to work with various laptop makes and models at the same time? Is there a way to bypass the MAC address check? Is there anything else I’m missing or advice anyone has?
-
@smoooo said in Can Fog do this....?:
So, in a perfect world, I’d like to have a Fog server set up on an independent, basic network. Plug in a random laptop and after pxe booting, have Fog wipe the drive and install a linux image.
This is an isolated/dedicated imaging network mode. This configuration is supported by FOG. In this case FOG will be acting as the dhcp server for this network to allow pxe booting. In this configuration you might consider adding a second network interface in this system so you can manage the fog server from the business (school) network, but still have all imaging done on the imaging network.
Can I set up Fog to work with various laptop makes and models at the same time?
In general FOG can work with most hardware models. I think in your case using a linux base image that image has all of its drivers built into the kernel so you don’t need to worry about deploying hardware specific drivers with linux. Now if you want to add windows into the mix that is a different problem all together.
Is there a way to bypass the MAC address check?
I think in this case you will use what I call “Load and Go” mode. Many system rebuilder use this mode because once the system is imaged with FOG, FOG will never see the system again because it is being sold. The load and go mode relies on the iPXE Menu Deploy Image menu. From that menu you select the image to deploy to the target computer. Once FOG deploys the image it forgets about the target computer. In this load and go mode the target computer needs to be self sufficient upon the first boot of the OS since the fog server will not be able to rename the system after imaging (because FOG forgets about the target computer right after telling it to reboot at the end of imaging). The advantage of load and go is that you don’t need to register the computer with FOG or any of that, just load the OS and Go.
-
@george1421 MAN! Thank you so much for the help! I just didn’t want to spend hours setting things up only to eventually learn it wouldn’t work for us. I’m gonna get cracking on this right now! Thanks again for the info, you rock!!
-
@smoooo If you are going to use two network adapters (recommended) before you install fog, know the linux name of the nic that will be your imaging network interface. Make sure you have static IP address mapping done on the imaging network interface. When you install FOG it will ask you which interface do you want to use. Make sure you name it correctly. Also FOG gets angry if you change the IP address of the imaging network interface after FOG is installed. So have your network configuration complete before you install FOG.
