Best posts made by ckasdf

@george1421 You weren’t kidding about the 10 minutes, that was easy! There was another article on DNSMASQ that I had looked at before putting up this post, which looked mega complicated. Likely it was intended to do more than just PXE stuff. I haven’t deployed anything, but I registered a computer successfully after booting to PXE, so now I just have to migrate from laptop to server. w00t!

@Sebastian-Roth I followed your instructions, and after restarting the service, the FOG log says:

Checking Product Key Activation: #1234567890123456789012345#

No extra spaces anywhere, and also no dashes. (Obviously the 123…345 above is just 25 characters of filler.) For reference, when I performed machine inventory at the first PXE boot, I assigned the Product Key, but did not type in dashes. When viewing the key in the GUI, it has dashes, though they disappear if I click in the field. If I try typing dashes, they appear and disappear.

Perhaps the best/easiest way to manage this is to allow the user to input with or without dashes, and then store the key stripped of dashes, so that when it’s run against the length checker, it matches 25. Let me know what you think, and if you have any additional tests you’d like me to perform.

@Sebastian-Roth Finally got a chance this morning to try the modified DLL, and it worked to activate the computer.

Thanks for the insight! I copied one of my build images to a test-copy, then made two changes. I then ran sysprep /generalize /reboot /unattend and allowed the VM to sysprep and reboot to see what happens. I didn’t capture it to run it through FOG, but I imagine the results will be mirrored once I do.

1. I noticed that your unattend file didn’t contain a reference to SetupComplete. Therefore, I edited unattend.xml to remove the <Component> block that contained <AutoLogon> and <LogonCommands> (within which was contained the reference to SetupComplete.cmd).

2. I moved unattend.xml to the Panther directory at your suggestion. When I ran sysprep, I tested it without defining a file, and sure enough, it picked it up with no problem.

After allowing sysprep to do its job, I logged in as the local admin (since I didn’t have FOG to join the domain for me), and no command windows popped up to try running SetupComplete as the local user. SetupComplete didn’t appear in the Startup tab of Task Manager. FOGService was set to Automatic and was Running. In other words, the things that weren’t supposed to be happening no longer were, and the things that were supposed to happen WERE!

 

By the way, slightly on the topic, I know the wiki suggests restarting the computer with a command in SetupComplete after enabling the FOG Client, but Microsoft’s documentation suggests this is a bad idea:

Warning You cannot reboot the system and resume running SetupComplete.cmd. You should not reboot the system by adding a command such as shutdown -r. This will put the system in a bad state.

My SetupComplete file contains two lines:

sc config FOGService start= auto
net start FOGService

It seems to still restart if needed, so maybe the shutdown line can be removed?

 

Thanks to @fry_p, @george1421, and @Sebastian-Roth for your contributions in helping me figure out this strange issue!