That is how also run my fog servers… I started with a virtual machine on vmware esxi and have another physical running on Ubuntu (testing server). Neither one of them are member of our Windows Domain and they work just fine. They do handle everything on their own except for DNS, which I get from Windows domain controllers.

You can run a virtual machine on a windows machine an install fog in it but it will mostl likely take you you some time to get setup correctly, especially the DHCP server part…

There are different ways to accomplish this until the new client is ready; for example:

You can use psexec.exe to push them by hand if necessary.

You could push the snapins either before (need local administrator user and password) or after (need local administrator user and password or domain admin user and password) joining the domain.

You could also setup a startup script in your default image or use the unattended.xml to run batch files to start your snapins after setup.

You can use RunOnce Registry key…

Etc,

did you try for Windows XP and windows 7

network printers
rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /dn /q /n\server\printer

or
local printers
rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /dl /q /n

for Windows 7 and above

network
[FONT=Courier New][COLOR=#000000]printui.exe /dn /n “\server\printer”[/COLOR][/FONT]

[FONT=Courier New][COLOR=#000000]local[/COLOR][/FONT]
[FONT=Courier New][COLOR=#000000]printui.exe /dl /n “NAME_OF_PRINTER” [/COLOR][/FONT]/q

[url]http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee624057.aspx[/url]
[url]http://support.microsoft.com/kb/189105[/url]
[url]http://texhex.blogspot.com/2014/03/deleting-local-or-network-printers-as.html[/url]

Did you disable UAC ? , I disable UAC on Windows 7 with this batch command running from sfx snapin

::DISABLE UAC
REG ADD HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v EnableLUA /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

You will probably need to research windows 8.1 + batch files on google as it seems to be a problem with your OS

I believe snapin execution has always been delayed by 5 minutes by default. It can be changed on the client config.ini

[snapinclient]
checkintime=307

Somebody correct me if this wrong information please

“Doubleclicking on the SFX snapin results in a success.
(it’s a self extracting archive made with “7-Zip SFX maker” that then calls the batch file, I also tried “SFXMaker”)”

Do the snapins run after the computer boots, renames itself and joins the domain ? There should be some kind of message on fog.log giving you some kind of clue ?

Not sure this is the solution to your batch problem or not but try to set the <Extraction path> to a directory that “everyone” has read/write permissions; for example c:\Windows\temp. I found sometimes that SFX snapins won’t run if you leave the Extraction path to temporary folder box checked.

Otherwise, I have no clue as I am not running Win 8.1 yet; running windows 7 pro 64bit