Re: First Impressions / Introduction

Hello Everyone,

I haven’t been here in quite sometime. I just wanted to stop by and say thank you again for the initial help. It is because of this community that I have decided to pursue a career in development. I hope that one day I can find a useful application for this software once again, and hopefully contribute in a more meaningful way. The first time I visited here, I didn’t really understand what it meant to be part of an open source community but, I’ve unconsciously carried the values learned here into my career and personal life. Good to see things are still moving along here. Thank you!

Well gentlemen it works! I cranked out 15 images in about 5 hours this afternoon with my lab. To say the least my team was impressed with FOG, considering I had nothing but problems up until today. I would like to thank everyone for their help with the initial setup. Now its time to convince the suits to let us put it on the production network

Re: First Impressions / Introduction

Hello Everyone,

I haven’t been here in quite sometime. I just wanted to stop by and say thank you again for the initial help. It is because of this community that I have decided to pursue a career in development. I hope that one day I can find a useful application for this software once again, and hopefully contribute in a more meaningful way. The first time I visited here, I didn’t really understand what it meant to be part of an open source community but, I’ve unconsciously carried the values learned here into my career and personal life. Good to see things are still moving along here. Thank you!

Well gentlemen it works! I cranked out 15 images in about 5 hours this afternoon with my lab. To say the least my team was impressed with FOG, considering I had nothing but problems up until today. I would like to thank everyone for their help with the initial setup. Now its time to convince the suits to let us put it on the production network

Updating to the latest of trunk this morning resolved the issues I was having. I was able to upload an image of an Optiplex 780 running Windows Vista x64. The deployment of said image seemed to go off without a hitch. After the imaging process was complete, I was unable to boot to my HD. No error message regarding corrupted MBR was displayed, it would just follow to PXE, manually selecting HD would cause the boot order menu to freeze. Boot order was set to HD first and PXE second. Once PXE load screen was brought up it would list the PXE version then a blinking cursor in the top left, no indication of it attempting to reach out to the network. I put a Windows Vista cd to run start up repair, it is able to detect my image installation but startup repair didn’t help either. It could very likely be a bad disk, guy here before me seemed to have a problem separating bad parts.

I’m close gentlemen I can feel it. Thank for continuing to point me in the right direction.

Sorry for the vague responses. The first model I had issues with was an Dell Optiplex 780, second model I tested was HP Compaq 4000. Looking at that list the HP model is not supported, while the Optiplex is. I see a recommended kernel for the Dell, could this potentially be the culprit? Not sure if this helps at all but I was able to successfully get these to register through the FOG boot menu and web GUI using FOG 1.2.0 on Ubuntu 14.04 ( my current trunk install is running on this).

Is it possible that this is a result of my DHCP configuration? I’m currently using isc-dhcp-server is dnsmanq a preferred option?

So I’ve got the lab setup, more issues I’ve ran into. I can successfully PXE boot into the FOG menu but, once I get there if I select anything the machine does a complete reboot.
I tried changing my dhcp settings to load unidonly.kkpxe no, same results. So I am currently unable to register a host. I have no problem accessing the web GUI but I cannot register the host there either.

I am currently running the latest trunk release as of 9 am this morning.

Gentlemen, I solved the issue I was discussing earlier but ran into another problem. Corporate does not want a FOG server on their production network as of now, so I was instructed to take it down.

With that being said, I started building a lab. Got a spare computer as my FOG server and a 24 port switch. Now my question to you guys is how can I install the trunk version of FOG without an internet connection during the install process? Is this possible?

I found this article, https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/FOG_on_an_Isolated_Network.
If I am reading it correctly, I allow my one and only NIC on FOG server to accept it’s IP via DHCP for the initial install. Then during the “What is the IP address to be used by this FOG Server?” phase I assign it a static IP for my lab environment. Obviously I don’t want to hook it up to our production environment and accidentally put a second DHCP server on the network so I’m a bit skeptical at this point in time.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Noted Jbob.

I’ve been doing some research for the past hour or so. With trunk updates is it still necessary to sysprep a Windows 7 / Vista host before you upload an image? We run both. Ideally I’d like to create a master image for each type of workstation we have. Probably 5 different models. Based on what I have read would sysprep be the way to go? I’m going to discuss our license policy with the team. Lots of the machines have been Frankenstein-ed from what I can tell. Same model, different amounts of RAM and varying HDD sizes. Where does FOGprep fall into place with sysprep?

Any best practice suggestions would be extremely helpful.

Appreciate the quick replies guys! I was able to play around with FOG in my production environment today. Ubuntu Server 14.04 & FOG 1.2.0, smooth sailing registering a few clients and uploading an image from a Dell Optiplex 755 running Win 7 Pro. Ran into some issues deploying said image onto another Optiplex 755 with . Host would PXE boot to FOG menu, recognized that I had assigned it a download task for the image. Once partclone screen appeared, I was received image is not a partclone image and the computer would reboot to PXE, rinse and repeat.

I attempted some suggestions that you guys provided like upgrading to trunk using the wget methold, I also updated my kernel to the recommend version suggested for the Optiplex 755 on the wiki. Now the system won’t boot into FOG menu when the host is set to run a task. It’s very likely I did something incorrectly as I’m pretty new to linux.

I’m considering doing a rebuild of the server on Dediban tomorrow like you gentlemen have suggested. Practice makes perfect right?

Just recently got my foot into the door of corporate IT work a few months ago. Currently working as Jr. Systems Admin and I was tasked with creating a new Symantec Ghost server. Long story short, Ghost kicked my ass. Couldn’t figure it out and got to a point where I had no idea where I went wrong and decided to start over. I used FOG to image computers at a prior internship and decided to take a shot at creating my own server.

I’ve been playing around with it all weekend in my virtual test environment using Virtual Box. Windows Server 2012 R2 hosting a basic Domain Controller, pfSense to create a virtual WAN connection (so I don’t mess with my roommates connections), a few end clients, and now FOG 1.2.0 on an Ubuntu 14.04 install. I’ve successfully registered hosts, uploaded an image, deployed said image. I absolutely cannot wait to start testing this in my production environment. Two large warehouses, roughly 400-500 computers in total. My senior team members have never heard of it and want a basic walk through / presentation this week.

After some initial work, I would love to have every end client in both buildings registered to their respective FOG server and be able to image a computer without leaving my desk. I do have admin privileges for both buildings. What are some issues I should keep in mind while implementing this into our system? I’ve read that ensuring switches are enabled to support multicast is key, we have 6 IDF’s in each warehouse running Extreme Network Switches. I’m pretty new to writing script files, FOG seems like an excellent place to practice. What type of simple Snapin’s would be valuable for basic automation and learning? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

The active posts from developers and community support will certainly have me floating around these forums a lot more.