Posts made by BigMan99211

From my experience, most multicast issues come from an issue with your switch configuration.
Caution - Don’t use multicast on a production network during business hours…
I found out the hard way on this. My network bandwidth pegged out for the duration of transfer.
Multicast doesn’t care where the machines are that are getting imaged, as every port, on every switch on your network will get hit with the same data at the same time. You’re actually better off using unicast for 25 machines. Multicast is really only helpful if you have 100’s of machines to image in one night. <—emphasis on the NIGHT!

What is the best way to back up my images?

Right now, I have Ubuntu, FOG, and the image store all on a single 500GB drive. I really would like to back all of this up to a storage server. I have a network share running on Server 2008 R2… Would it be possible to back the images up to there?

I’ll chime in on this one. I’m running 0.33b and I have the fog client already installed on the image that i’m pushing. Once the machine boots, the hostnamechanger module will check the FOG server to see what name is associated with the current MAC address that the client is installed on. So, as long as you have the host already set up in FOG server, the machine should just rename itself.

But, I went a little further. I have the machine sysprepped and joining my domain, which also works amazingly! Right now, my systems will image, reboot, go through oobe setup, reboot, rename, reboot, join domain, reboot, and finally install any snapins that I have for them. Automation is SO MUCH FUN! ! !

Yes, that fixed it. Everything is back in is zero-touch glory!

Found it…

This is the last 2 lines before reboot:

*Checking Mounted File System…/bin/fog.download: line 394: syntax error near unexpected token ‘fi’
/bin/fog.download: line 394: ’ fi’

Whatever has changed between 1303 and 1310 has broken my imaging process.

When I pushed the same process yesterday, everything was working fine. Now, it gets to the step right before part clone launches to copy the image, and the machine just reboots, cycles back, and does the same thing over again.

I’m using svn, and I just updated to revision 1310, but i’m still having the same issue.

Ok. I just figured out that I had the wrong network adapter booting to iPXE. But now, I’m getting errors when trying to load iPXE.

“Could not configure console: No such file or directory ([url]http://ipxe.org/2d8c203b[/url])”
“Could not boot: No such file or directory ([url]http://ipxe.org/2d8c203b[/url])”

Then it just boots to the VHD like normal.

Any ideas?

I recall reading a post about needed to change something in FOG to allow a VM to boot to iPXE.

Currently, I have the VM running on Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V.

OOOHH… Just had an epiphany as 5am…

Better yet, I’ll just have a machine group set up in PDQ Deploy, with all of the same machines that are in the FOG group. This way, I can just have the script talk directly to the PDQ Deploy machine group, instead of going all the way out and through FOG.

Thanks for the post Albatros. I did already see that. It needs a little updating though, as the guide is following an older version, and they’ve changed the interface a little. But, overall I still got it to work. I now have a full zero touch deployment system with deployment of any software package I choose.

My next goal is to make a script that will check daily for Flash and Java updates. When it finds one, the plan is to have the script change out the existing installer with the new one, then somehow notify FOG to reset the snapin deployment to all machines in a group. This should essentially create a sort of Auto Updater…

What do you mean by, the snapins are host related by design? I don’t mind that I have to select them, but could you add a selection option in the Full Host Registration menu, through iPXE? I just want to be able to take a new machine out of the box, plug it in, boot to the FOG menu, go through Full Host Registration, add hostname, image ID, domain add option, and snapin option, then let it go on it’s merry way.

Right now, the only way I can achieve zero touch, is to manually create the host through the web interface. It would be nice to be able to select all the same settings though iPXE.

I’ve noticed that, when you create a new host through the Full Registration in iPXE, by default, the service settings section of said host is empty (as in, no options are selected).

I’ve also noticed that no snapins deploy by default. I’ve been having to add them once the host is created. Is there a way to add a snapin selection option to the Full Host Registration?

By the way… Thanks for all the hard work Tom!
I know from experience, almost all jobs related to IT are fairly thankless.

So, is this failing before the image push completes, or upon reboot after imaging?

@Tom - Can said bat or cmd just be uploaded to FOG, or do I have to encapsulate it first?

Basically, what i’ve done is, made a PS script that sends an “Invoke-Command” to a server that I have PDQ Deploy (a software deployment system) running on. The invoke-command tells PDQ Deploy to run and deploy a specific software package to the machine that the PS script originally ran from. So, once it’s set up as a snapin, I can image, rename, join to domain, and deploy any software package to any/all of my PCs.

Then, taking if further, I want to eventually set up a daily recurring script that checks PDQ Deploy’s Package Library, for specific software updates. Once it finds one, it will download the package, and somehow notify FOG to Wake on LAN all machines, then invoke the deploy command to all machines in a specific IP range. This would essentially make Full Zero Touch with Automatic Updates!

Ok I’m going to just keep posting until someone helps me out here… :rolleyes:

All I need to know is what to enter to get a single power shell script to push out to a machine via snapin, and run on said machine…

So… What is hooking?

I’ve seen all these updates about it…

It’s just a little frustrating getting used to the way FOG does things. In Ghost, the partition info was extracted directly to .gho files. So, you never had to worry about the drive size, as long as your actual partition information fit on the disk. Now that I think about it, it even pulled multiple partitions (whole drive image) the same way.

Tried using SFX Maker, but FOG isn’t pushing it to the machine…

Whew!.. I just figured out how to save my butt here! I’m going to virtualize my 500GB drive onto one of my virtual hosts, then shrink the C:\ partition volume down to around 30-40GB, then shrink the virtual drive size down to match! Then, all I have to do is pull an image back to FOG.