@Tom-Elliott said in Use serial number as hostname in Fog:

{SYSSERIAL}

Ah, lovely, thanks Tom, I’ll give that a go - I tried SYSSERIAL on it’s own and it didn’t work but didn’t realise it needed the curly brackets!

@george1421 did you ever get round to writing a guide for this? It’s a shame this can’t be included in the main branch for quick registration, because we just name machines off the system serial number here and you have to pay extra now for a bloomin barcode with Dell!

@george1421 Well one of the reasons we run a windows server is because we run them in HA mode, but there doesn’t seem to be another DHCP server present from my testing. Tis very odd! But thank you for your help, at least you’ve confirmed we are doing the right things.

@george1421 Bizarrely, came in this morning and it was working happily! not the foggiest what was wrong, but does seem to have sorted itself out somehow!

@Sebastian-Roth while poking round in the BIOS on some new Dell machines I did find an option called “Force PXE on next Boot” - https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-uk/dell-cmnd-config-v3.0/dell_command_configure_cli-v3/-forcepxeonnextboot?guid=guid-85c17652-4a18-4538-8665-e6b3e777d649&lang=en-us

You have to have the dell tools installed, but this would be a possible option.

I know with my current machines when a BIOS update happens it keeps overwriting the boot order so my PXE boot doesn’t happen. Quite annoying!

I don’t know how I’d go about making the FOG Client execute this command before a task reboot though.

@george1421 thanks - good steps to check.

Yes, I can ping from that subnet, and I can also tftp the file from one of my linux hosts on that subnet with no issues. There is a router in between, but it’s not filtering traffic to my knowledge. It is passing DHCP requests to our windows DHCP server for that subnet/vlan however.

And yes, the ip address is correct, the router is sat on 10.1.22.254.

@Tom-Elliott ah, that would work! Sorry, the documentation is such a mish-mash that it’s hard to find answers for some of this stuff!

@Tom-Elliott I believe it would be very simple to add a check in for this though, not all of us have the luxury of dedicated hardware for gold images!

The client could check HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\Setup for AuditInProgress - and if that matches then it can pause any tasks.

If you have the FOG client installed in an image and you boot a host into audit mode, and still have something like active directory join active for that host, the client will ignore the fact that it’s in audit mode and join the machine to the domain!

I’ve not tested it, but I assume that it will also try and deploy any snap-in’s configured also.

IMHO when in Audit mode the client should be in a paused state, and not respond to tasks.

Hi All,

I’ve recently deployed FOG into it’s own subnet - and things are working great there where FOG is allowed to run it’s own DHCP server.

However I’d like to start moving machines out onto other subnets, which we manage via Windows DHCP Server.

I’ve configured Option 66 and 67, as well as option 150 (hoping that would fix things!) but the machine boots from the network and gets to asking for a TFTP server. You specify one, and it times out, then says chainloading failed.

Pic here if you’re interested: https://photos.app.goo.gl/44BQhe3ArNk3ngGRA

Loving FOG so far by the way, but getting this to work will avoid us having to manually re-configure boot order options (as windows seems to happily chuck itself at the start of the boot order all the time!).

TIA

Alexis