Multicasting without registration in 1.2.0
-
Hello, everyone. I found a guide here: https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/Bypass_Host_Registration on how to multicast without the need to register hosts first, but the guide is for an older version and I am using 1.2.0. Many of the described files are different, called something different, or in another location.
Here’s my situation:
I have a bench of laptops I’d like to multicast blast an image out to. Anything could be on the hard drives already, an OS, some corrupt OS data, whatever. So sometimes when after I quick register a host, it restarts and starts booting into a Windows which gets pretty annoying. I’d like to have it setup in a way where after I netboot, it will hang and wait for an image without the need to register to a group or anything. And then when I have my bench of machines hanging and waiting I can hit a button and multicast the image out. I’m only dealing with one image at a time and one “type” of laptop at a time.
Any help or insight would be much appreciated.
-
What you’re wanting to do is sort of dangerous. Imagine if “computers just multicast”, and other computers in your building network boot… they get imaged too.
FOG is designed to work with registered hosts.
That said, I think in FOG Trunk, there’s a way to join a multicast session from the boot menu - but I don’t know if that works with unregistered hosts or not.
Do you know the benefits of working with the fog system instead of against it?
- Automatic computer naming
- Automatic domain joining
- Automatic printer deployment
- Automatic snapin deployment
- a ton of other stuff you can do with just a click.
For my organization, imaging 30 computers was once a half day to day job. Now it’s under an hour and doesn’t take two or three people to do, and we don’t even have to do anything but click a button… we walk away and do something else, and come back to 30 computers that are ready to be used by users.
-
I understand that, but nothing else in this subnet, building, or organization is ever going to netboot. So I’m confident that I won’t be deploying out to machines that aren’t supposed to be imaged.
I’d like an option on the boot menu that would would auto reg, add to a group, and then wait for multicast all in one option from the boot menu, or just bypass the group and reg and just flag it to receive an image via a multicast push. Is that or something similar to that possible to do? The goal is to not have a machine register, restart into windows or whatever leftover are on the drive I want to image, and then need to be turned off or rebooted again.
And while those features are nice, and I would consider using the hostnaming and domain joining but we start up scripts that do that for us already.
-
@forte647 said:
I’d like an option on the boot menu that would would auto reg, add to a group, and then wait for multicast all in one option from the boot menu, or just bypass the group and reg and just flag it to receive an image via a multicast push. Is that or something similar to that possible to do? The goal is to not have a machine register, restart into windows or whatever leftover are on the drive I want to image, and then need to be turned off or rebooted again.
That’s a feature request. @Developers
However, I’ll tell you that perhaps you would be satisfied with FOG Trunk’s speed increases. I can deploy a 40GB image over 1Gbps LAN in about 6 minutes. And FOG Trunk has a better system for unicasting to unregistered computers. You can pick your images for one thing. At this very moment, it might be the way to go for you.
-
@Wayne-Workman said:
That’s a feature request. @Developers
However, I’ll tell you that perhaps you would be satisfied with FOG Trunk’s speed increases. I can deploy a 40GB image over 1Gbps LAN in about 6 minutes. And FOG Trunk has a better system for unicasting to unregistered computers. You can pick your images for one thing. At this very moment, it might be the way to go for you.
Is that just for unicasting or can I use multicast in that way as well with trunk? I was pleased with the transfer speed and everything (outside of needing to boot each client twice) of the multicast session for 15 laptops yesterday (the software is very nice and the web gui is conducive to my purposes and setup). I don’t want to have 15 unicast sessions firing.
-
@forte647 said:
I was pleased with the transfer speed and everything of the multicast session for 15 laptops yesterday
If you liked that, FOG Trunk will blow your socks off.
As far as I know, imaging unregistered computers using FOG Trunk only works with Unicast.
You can set (in storage management) how many active tasks are allowed. I keep mine set at 2. Then you network boot all machines. 2 will start. The rest wait in line and automatically start.
-
@Wayne-Workman You can image unregistered computers using multicast with trunk. You just have to create a session for it specifying the amount of clients and such first.
-
@Wayne-Workman said:
If you liked that, FOG Trunk will blow your socks off.
As far as I know, imaging unregistered computers using FOG Trunk only works with Unicast.
You can set (in storage management) how many active tasks are allowed. I keep mine set at 2. Then you network boot all machines. 2 will start. The rest wait in line and automatically start.
Thanks for the suggestion to move to trunk, and thanks Quazz for the clarification on whether or not multicast worked. This is exactly what I wanted/needed!
For any wayward googlers:
I upgraded my install to trunk using these instructions: https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/Upgrade_to_trunk pretty straight forward.After the upgrade completed, I went back to image management in the web gui, selected multicast image, started a new session for the amount of clients I wanted, netbooted each client to fog’s boot menu and selected join multicast session. it goes when the specified number of clients connect.
Wonderful. Thanks a lot, guys.
