Posts made by Bob Henderson

@Wayne-Workman Oh, definately. And lets face it, a majority of users are clickers anyways, so that’s what should be developed first.

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

@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.

@Bob-Henderson said in Webcast: Imaging with FOG, Managing with PDQ:

@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!

An update on this. I got it working, and it worked fantastically. Presents a webpage, user pics what apps they want, and it makes an exe that fires off to tell PDQ to install it.

HOWEVER

In discussions with PDQ, I was told that it’s a violation of the EULA, as each user who is ‘interacting’ with pdq, in this case telling it to fire off, would need to be licensed. It doesn’t apply as much in this instance, so you’re the one firing it off each time in the image, but something to consider if you have multiple techs who do the imaging, etc.

We’re a 1:1 windows laptop school. We have local disk as first boot option for this very reason, kids leave the building daily with them.

For our desktops, we put PXE first so I can WoL them in off hours and image.

One thing that’s bugging me as a way to manage with fog only is the multiple mac addresses. I register them with the wired NIC, then the wireless nic sometimes shows up in the pending macs, but sometimes not.

@Joe-Schmitt Just dropping from NFS over to HTTP/SPDY/etc is huge.

@Joe-Schmitt Any documentation or such available for this? I’m curious about how you’re doing it from a technical perspective.

@Obi-Jon

Ah, yeah, I remember that game. We ended up doing a disconnect/reconnect system myself, to alleviate the issues.

good thing there are more colors available, huh?

@Obi-Jon Thats how it started with us too. Labels didn’t work, cuz who can asked to read something written in big letters on each end…

So we stock 10 colors now, and they all have a reason for them. We have a sign made up for the colors, and posted it in every room laminated.

@Obi-Jon eww ya, no, don’t do that.

Color code the jacks and cables. blue jack, blue cable, orange jack, orange cable. It’s what we do for our users. Another school here, but we’re a 1:1 shop so all my stuff are laptops. Snapins are my saving grace, tied with PDQ Deploy

@Obi-Jon That’s great to see. We see very similar speeds with ours, though it’s just a VM on ZFS based storage with 4g of ram and 2 cores. I think the key is making sure you’ve got solid clients, and ssds on the client side. And Intel nics.

Some of our broadcom equipped thinkpads max out at around 7, the intel Dells hit the 10,11 mark.

This is all on gzip. Haven’t made a new image since the new compression.

@george1421 Alright. I’ll have to dig through those scripts more, I guess. I’ve liked the thought of FOG handling it, but have never really went into it and I’m not sure why. Guess I like to keep my imaging and my application/driver bet seperate for some inane reason

@george1421 Awesome, that’s simple enough. Does the unattend option support a network location as well. i.e. \server\with\drivers ?

Our total driver store we need to add is under 4g, so it’s nothing crazy, but network based could make it easier to maintain for sure…

@george1421 sorry coming into this late but link to the oobe stuff?

I’ve just been doing the process here to add downriver store in one big chunk.
http://bobhenderson.org/add-multiple-drivers-win10-driverstore-one-shot/

@Lee-Rowlett Ah, yeah, that.

Can’t you just add them to the driver store though via PNPUtil so they’re ready to go?

@Lee-Rowlett

Care to go in more depth on the Win10 changes? I’ve been doing the classic DevicePath change, as I’ve only got 2 models and it’s quicker to just include the drivers, but I’m noticing it’s not really applying much…

@Troye-Johnson I know I sound like I’m a broken record here, but have you attempted to have your pdq script itself dump to a log file, to see if it’s even being alled and the like?

Also, those &quot symbols are usually found to replace " in commands. Could attempt pulling them out and going to like ’ in your command, or perhaps using variables to call the relevant data instead?

You need to see what the hard drive is being mounted as, and pass that on as the disk info in FOG for it to recognize. NVME and EMMC drives are bad for this, as they don’t show up as a traditional disk.

I’d take a look at what you got when you registered the laptop, and pass that in the host files on the web interface.

I sill say that with Windows 10 currently, I’ve yet to have it not find a driver for something out of the box through Windows Update. It’s been very lucky, I’m sure, but it’s been huge.

We only have 4 models to support, due to forcing bulk purchases, but use 1 image for it with drivers added to the DriverStore using PNPUtil. Since we’re a Dell and Lenovo shop, they offer SCCM cab’s of the files which makes it very easy to throw them all in.

@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!