Bill -
I’m new to FOG, a complete newbie on LINUX, but fairly well versed with the MS world. I have just come up with a way to enhance FOG snapin deployment using DFS. I had assumed the rsync stuff I’ve seen would get me replicas of the images on different storage nodes, but I want redundancy and multiple sources at each site for snapins. Further, I find the whole single-file installation limitation of FOG untenable. I can’t have software installation content stuffed into a single file, as most SW in the MS world consists of several files.
So I wrote a program called FOGExe.exe. It leverages the TFTP site where a FOGExe.ini file is stored that has the sharename (DFS or UNC), username and password for accessing the Windows server. A parameter in the snapin parameter field points to the dir within the share and the program looks there for a specific .cmd file - FOGExe.cmd. This cmd has all the commands you’d want to perform the snapin installation. I typically put two versions of an installation in such directories - one to install and the other to repair.
This program is brand new and has been only lightly tested. As I’m new to FOG, I can’t say I won’t enhance this more over the next little while. I’m using FOG now as a replacement for a homegrown system that used BartPE for XP and WInBuilder for Win7 to create ISO that were PXEbooted and uncasted images with Ghost32. For software deployment we had a system that could detect if someone was logged in and would allow for interactive and silent installation. I may want to retain this feature and it would be easy to add it to FOGExe.
If this is of any interest to you, I’ll post it sooner rather than later. I had planned to post it but as I said, it’s new. I’d appreciate any info related to your problem with syncing Linux storage repositories over WAN and how one mounts DFS on a Linux box. Also, why use the Linux bos for TFTP at all? If you can copy the contents of the linux tftpboot dir to windows? I’ve used pxelinux.0 and pxeclient.cfg on windows for some time.
I’m not sure how these forums work, so I’ll check back here for a response.