Best posts made by Bob Henderson

@trialanderror Incorrect.

The last RC was released in early November. November,December, and January are usually development wastelands for MOST Products, due to the large amounts of holidays, outside of work obligations, and then inside of work end of year stuff that needs to get done.

Developers here are working, as always, as they can with the time allowed. I’d expect some more news in the coming weeks, but that is nothing more than a gut feeling I personally have vs having anything to go on.

As this is a opensource project, if you’d like to see more development, you are more than welcome to jump in and try to fix open issues!

@danpbow Short answer; No, no it is not.

Long answer: No, unless you’re wanting to spend thousands at a data recovery spot and potentially get nothing back for it.

This is a great chance for you to discuss backup, and if you’re in a domain environment, setup redirected folders and the like.

@Wayne-Workman I find that a bit overzealous. My fog server itself is a crappy *buntu Vm with 2g of ram and 2 cores, hooked into our Vswitch of 8 ports, and my clients are all i5 8g of ram laptops. I routinely image 10 at a time in unicast, 40+ in multicast. When I have all 10 imaging, yes, the imaging is around 50% slower than just doing 1, but the time savings are still huge.

No dice here. It’s open house night at work.

on the plus side, was able to use FOG to image out 700 units in 3 hours today. Thanks, multicast and stacked switches!

@guilherme.lima

It’s possible with many different VDI tools. Fog is not a VDI tool. CCBoot is.

For Linux, using LTSP would work easily to stream the OS to the users, and have their data on a central NFS setup or the like.

For Windows, using something like RDP is the easiest, but you have to deal with user cals and the like becuase of this. There are third parties, like Citrix and such, as well, but you still need to deal with licenses.

Maybe you should start with what is your goal. Stream the oS from a boot environment? to cheap chromebooks? what.

@x23piracy said in Webcast: Imaging with FOG, Managing with PDQ:

:D Sounds great how do you guys want to manage fog images in a better way as it is? Little details please?
FYI i am a paying PDQ Deploy Customer ;) Lovely tool.

What i found so far:

http://bobhenderson.org/fog-zero-touch-imaging-with-pdq-deploy/
http://bobhenderson.org/pdq-deploy-fog-imaging-happiness-take-2/

Regards X23

Mod edited

ha, holy crap, that’s me!

http://bobhenderson.org/pdq-deploy-fog-imaging-happiness-take-2/

Create that in inventory, and after the machines join the domain from the Fog Client, it’ll find em in the collection and deploy! It’s that easy!

@george1421 Thanks George. I understand about the IP reasons.

That site makes sense, now that I can see where the offline service bit had to be put. I had it in the wrong spot on mind, which meant drivers weren’t being picked up. Moved it, and it’s working great.

Thanks!

@george1421 Actually reminded me to renew the domain name on that one before I lost it! God I need to post more updates.

We’re still using FOG and PDQ to image out our 1:1 fleet of computers, as well as having it tied into our server deployments automated via Ansible onto our Proxmox KVM boxes. It’s working fantastically.

The next thing I’m working on (shoot for the moon, right?) is to use FOG to host Snapins and make them accessible outside of the LAN, that’ll then pull down some powershell to grab files via HTTPS from our web cluster to do remote installations if needed. I’ve got a proof of concept working, but I’m a 1 man shop and haven’t had time to do much more on it. But if it works, I’ll effectively be able to push installs both on and offsite, without having to use DirectAccess as the tie back. The powershell has some if’s in there to see if they’re on the LAN, which will then tell it to grab PDQ’s packages, but if they’re off, it’ll grab them from the HTTPS repository and fire off msiexec on them manually.

It’s poor mans SCCM!

@x23piracy Look at the wiki bud, it’s in there line for line.

https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=FOG_Client#FOG_Client_with_Sysprep

sc config FOGService start= auto
shutdown -t 0 -r

you basically put that in your setupcomplete.cmd and boom, done.

No lie, but being the cli-focused guy I am, I’d absolutely love keyboard shortcuts…

@Tom-Elliott Works for me! I just remember when 14.04 came out, 1.2 had some issues installing on it, so I kept with 12.04. I just looked at my server that did work, and it is 14.04. Time to try that out!

@x23piracy
I can also confirm, with multiple pieces of hardware (In this case, Dell Optiplex 790, Dell E7450, Lenovo Thinkpad T520, and Thinkpad X140e), that zstd and 1.4 will give me sub 5 min deploys of a fully configured Win10 image, including Office, Adobe Suite, and all Win. Updates.

I routinely deploy to 100+ devices a week, in both uni and multi cast. Fog server is an old P4 with 4 gigs of ram and 4 nics in a LACP bridge.

@guilherme.lima

This will come off as dickish, but I don’t care. It needs to be said.

A: Fog is NOT a vdi/remote desktop solution. It is an imaging solution, designed for use on the local lan or a distributed networking environment, not over the public internet. It will not work the way you are asking it to, nor is it designed to. You’re being given a screw driver and trying to use it to hammer nails.

B: Streaming a VHD over HTTP sounds like an ultimate fail to me, due to things like latency and bandwidth involved. If you’re dealing with cheap end user devices already, this is gonna be a nightmare. Take a look at things like LTSP and the like, see how they get around this, and the limitations they have on a LOCAL network, and go from there.

C: Look at systems like the Guacamole Project on Apache to figure how they’re doing HTML5 gui streaming via VNC/RDP/etc and see if you can build on that. Note, the info there is simply being displayed, not streamed over the internet, and there is still latency involved.

D: Putting out a request for someone to basically help you develop the entire project you’re trying to build an ‘eco-friendly startup’ on rubs me the wrong way, since so far you’ve offered nothing back to the group nor seem to be in a place, financially or technically, to do so.

@george1421 Yep, that’s exactly what @Zaarin noticed in his first post. Looks like a fat finger kind of thing that we all do every once in a while.

Updated to 8341, this seems to be fixed. had me freaked out, as my 4th of july weekend involves imaging 1200 machines…

@Psycholiquid Just did the exact same thing, and pushed out an image multicast to 46 devices in 13 minutes, from start to being able to login.

best. Feeling. Ever.