FOG is renaming my Windows hostname?
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We recently upgraded from .32 to 1.2.0 and have noticed since then it seems FOG is somehow renaming the Windows hostname to whatever the machine has been registered as in fog.
We do not use the FOG service, it is not installed to any machines.
We have a Windows 10 image captured in “audit mode”, we deploy it to a host registered as PC-123. Upon booting the deployed PC, its Windows hostname is PC-123. If I rename the same host within FOG to PC-456, then deploy the same image, Windows has a hostname of PC-456.
How/why is this happening!?
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Hostname changing happens after image deploying but before the client reboots. This is done by hostname_early which can be disabled under fog settings on the GUI.
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I feel I need to ask, is this not a good thing? Is this not what you would really want to happen? If not, why? Of course you’re allowed to setup however you want, but I don’t understand how it renaming a system is a bad thing. Think of it in the context that you cannot have multiple systems with the same hostname, just as you cannot have multiple systems with the same IP address on a network.
If your image has a name of PC123, and you don’t want the hostname to be changed, and have decided to image two other machines with the “audit mode image” you could start seeing issues. This could occur because all three systems (now) have the same hostname. Communication between them would be difficult and may not even work because the names are the same.
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Being aggravated with fog renaming computers, and then wanting to disable it… that’s like being used to a manual transmission, and then being aggravated when you get a car that shifts automatically… and then trying to go through 1st, 2nd, and D manually instead of just slapping it into D and not worrying about it.
Computer renaming is one of the top reasons to use fog.
People have all of these other ways they “take care of” renaming and domain joining. And that is fine void of FOG, but FOG offers a more simple and streamlined solution. A lot of people are confused at first, but I promise it’s worth your time to check it out.
How is it worth your time? Simple math.
It used to take me and a team mate half a day to image 30 computers in our building. If it was just me, it was most of the day. With fog, it only takes one person, and I just click a button. Then I go do something else for an hour, and I come back and it’s done. Computers renamed, joined to the domain, software and printers deployed. Computers READY TO BE USED by the user, right then and there.
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Thanks for your prompt reply Tom and Wayne. I am by no means aggrivatged by the feature and certainly don’t consider it a bad thing.
I was simply curious as to where this setting was set within the FOG config and how it is performing the change.
I will definitely keep it enabled as it takes one step out of the deployment process for us, nice work!
Are you able to share how FOG performs this rename injection into Windows after the image has been deployed?
For those that may come across this post the setting is under FOG Configruation - FOG Settings - General Settings, then FOG_CHANGE_HOSTNAME_EARLY.
Thanks again
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@amr said:
Are you able to share how FOG performs this rename injection into Windows after the image has been deployed?
the fog.download script attempts to change the Windows name on every single partition that it can see, that way there are better odds of it happening. in your trunk directory, this script is in the src directory, way down in there.
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@amr said:
I will definitely keep it enabled as it takes one step out of the deployment process for us, nice work!
The client will also auto-name, and auto-join to domain… and a bunch of other things that will take many steps out of your deployment process.
