Fog images, third party cloning tools and portability

[Jezzer]

Hi everyone

Just recently got set up with a VIRTUAL BOX instance of FOG and its working pretty darn good I must say. As I am going about getting all my images all set up and learning my way round the system, a few things have occurred to me which I need to get advice from some more advanced FOG users.

I am setting up a PC business and when I looked into the best way to deploy OS’s to perhaps a few machines at once or even just the one, with all updates and software’s ready to go, I hit upon sysprep usage and FOG as being the best. I did try some of the Windows solutions like WDS but seemed way over complicated for what I wanted so settled for FOG and it does just what I want.

The first problem I hit upon was the “storage node” ethic, if you like. I wanted to host my images on a freenas CIFS share, but I simply couldn’t get past the permissions problem. Even though I pointed it to the folder on the server (//freenas/images), FOG always said it didn’t exit and gave me an access denied error. I was wondering if that was even possible. Does FOG need an actual designated other server set up as a Storage Node to work? In the end I have just made a huge VM box and do it all in that. No big deal if not.

The next thing is quite important and I hope some one can help. I will be mobile for some of my tasks and when I need to reimage a system I’d like to be able to take my FOG images with me and use them. However I don’t know what application can clone a system using a FOG image? I was hoping some one may have experience of this and let me know. I think partclone on the parted magic CD or Systemrescue CD might do it but I’m not sure thats the right thing to do.

So if that isnt possible could I take my Fogserver with me on a laptop in the Virtual Box. Has any one had experience of that, if so please let me know how you do it.

The other thing I was wondering about was bypassing the registration process. Is there a way to just boot a system from LAN then have a list of all the images on the server to choose from and then just image it right off the bat! Can this be done, if so how? And thanks.

Oh and one more thing. Can I do this over the internet? lol Lets say hit a duff system with a need to reload windows. Boot to LAN, use etherboot or perhaps some other method and get an image to come down that way? Not too fussed about that though if its not possible.

Summary

1. Can FOG created images be used by a third party application like partclone or clonezilla or otherwise?
2. Can A virtual FOG server be made portable for cloning solutions when I am out on the road?
3. Can I remove the need to register machines and just have a quick image menu to quickly start cloning/restoring a system?
4. Can FOG servers be used over the internet? As in boot from a internet connected house/office and image from my server at home to the system?

Thanks in advance.