General FOG questions

[ABane]

Hi all,

I’m looking around at various imaging solutions and I was wondering if anyone could answer some questions I have. I’ve tried contacting the team directly via their web form but it’s been about a week without a response so I thought I’d ask here.

1. I know that FOG supports imaging to Win 7-10, mac OS, and Linux, but can FOG also image Android and Chrome? I did some digging when I had a moment and noticed people were able to image Chromium through some convoluted mechanisms but was unsure if there been any development since those forum posts (2014 - 2015)
2. Upon imaging, can FOG input OS activation keys and create user accounts (including admin/root)?
3. Can this all be completed in a Zero Touch way? I.e. specifying the image, applications to install, OS keys, accounts etc prior to imaging and then leaving it to complete

Thanks in advance for your help.

[Tom Elliott]

@ABane said in General FOG questions:

I know that FOG supports imaging to Win 7-10, mac OS, and Linux, but can FOG also image Android and Chrome?

FOG Cannot image Chrome OS, iOS, or Android. This isn’t because we don’t want to either, it’s how these particular devices load. There’s no way for us to direct these systems to boot in a particular fashion. We cannot capture these system’s base images. As for the “Chromium OS” portions, yes we can image them, so long as they’re on systems that are “imagable”. Chromebooks, iOS, and Android, as stated earlier, are not ‘imageable’ from FOG’s standpoint.

@ABane said in General FOG questions:

Upon imaging, can FOG input OS activation keys and create user accounts (including admin/root)?

FOG Can input OS Activation Keys with the New FOG Client. It’s only operational for Windows based OS’s though. Through snapins, however, you can activate systems with the new FOG Client on macOS, Windows, and linux (as necessary). No, FOG Cannot create user accounts for people. That would leave a “gaping” security problem, I think, if we can tell the client to administer the main systems at that level.

@ABane said in General FOG questions:

Can this all be completed in a Zero Touch way? I.e. specifying the image, applications to install, OS keys, accounts etc prior to imaging and then leaving it to complete

FOG Was founding on the principle of “Zero touch” as much as possible. The basic idea of FOG was to be able to image systems from start to finish without having to leave your desk. The FOG Client, as stated earlier, is capable of “activating” the OS, “joining the domain”, configuring other routine tasks such as wake up, shutdown, restart, installing snapins (scripts or software depending on your needs), logging users (so you can keep track of who’s logging into which system and when, registering new macs (such as wireless nics), installing printers, and rebooting due to other tasks.

This is all managed by a simple PHP based web GUI.

In general, I think FOG is plenty capable of doing what you need, though it doesn’t do everything. There, sometimes, can be a learning curve as new technology and advancements sometimes leaves some problems which manual intervention may be necessary, but that’s all the more reason for these forums. We pride ourselves, I think, on responsiveness and support through these forums.

[ABane]

Thanks for the response @Tom-Elliott. I am curious about not being able to specify user accounts in conjunction with a Zero Touch mentality. When installing an iso of, for instance, Debian, specifying the admin name and password is part of the installation process. How does FOG get around this?

[Joe Schmitt]

@ABane in the case of Windows you have a couple options.

• Using the Windows tool called sysprep and an unnattend.xml file which specifies first-time boot configurations, you can set user account information
• You can use the FOG client to control user accounts using snapins. Snapins simply run any script / executable as root/SYSTEM so there is very few limits of what you can do using a snapin.

As for your debian question, FOG would capture a debian installation that you configured. So you would set the password before capturing the FOG image.

[ABane]

@Joe-Schmitt, that was what I imagined the case to be, thank you for the clarification.

-Anthony