Configuration for capturing and deploying ubuntu images
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Hello,
I have a working FOG Server (latest version), I want to use it to capture and deploy Ubuntu images. Is there something I should reconfigure in my FOG? or in my Ubuntu installation that I’m going to capture? how do I set up my DHCP server for this? or should I go ahead normally like I’m working with Windows images?
Thank you
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@anisgh Well your dhcp server would be the same settings for both windows and linux.
As for ubuntu, if you want to use single disk resizable in FOG don’t use LVM (logical volume manager) in linux. Just create standard or extended partitions. The rest is no problem. Really we have more problems with Windows than linux.
You might want to write a post install script to customize your target linux system after the image has been pushed. But that really depends on the scope of your linux deployment. You could set system names and other linux config file settings with a FOG post install script, but if you are only deploying one or 10 linux systems, it might be quicker to make the changes by hand.
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@george1421 Thank you for your response!
What about software? let’s say I have LibreOffice installed on the Ubuntu I’m about to clone, will this be also imaged and deployed to my other clients? or should I reinstall all the software afterwards using snapins?
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@anisgh I would say make your golden image as complete as possible. The only time you need to install applications after imaging (that includes MS Windows) is when the installation of the application creates a unique GUID to identify the system or application. The best example of this is enterprise antivirus. This is where each client would get its own system id to identify itself to the av management software. You would not want to clone this guid to every computer because then you will have many computers with the same GUID.
For linux there is no concept of this as far as I know. So load everything you need into your golden image and then capture and deploy your image and be happy.
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@george1421 This seems pretty awesome! thank you.
One last question: Can I configure my Ubuntu golden image to automatically join an Active Directory when deployed on a new machine using FOG? in other words: can FOG automatically add my new hosts to the active directory? if yes, how to configure this? -
@anisgh From the point of FOG deployments. FOG can’t do thing on the behalf of the target OS (windows or linux) but it can leave bread crumbs behind for the target OS when it first boots. For both windows and linux it could make config file changes so that when the target OS first boots that target OS can pick up the bread crumbs and do something with them.
For your connecting to AD question, that’s best to be done in linux with a first run connection script. Before System-D systems (like SYS-V) we would drop a S99zInit (can be any name, but name was picked to be the last script in startup) script into the init.d folder and do any local configurations once the target OS booted up, then remove the S99zInit creating a run once script.
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@george1421 I found this tutorial on the wiki page, this is what I want to do, but I don’t know if this is up to date and if it’s going to work on my pure Ubuntu capturing/deploying process.
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@anisgh I think the context was for the windows version of the FOG client. But I have no experience with using the linux version of the FOG client. I don’t think the linux version of the fog client will connect it to Window AD. That’s really not a linux thing to do. But by all means please try it and see if it works. I have just never done this to linux before.
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@anisgh Find some more information here: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/16057/customizing-ubuntu-deployed-images
