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@BedCruncher said in Mount and Extract files from images:

I know in the case of adding something I would have to go in and recompress the image and basically get it back to the proper directory and named the proper way at least according to what FOG expects for its own operation. Long term that isn’t what I was thinking about. It was more to be able to at least open an image in a read only format and be able to get access to the image and all files stored within without needing a host box to restore the image to. Espescially if the host box I have on hand is sufficiently different from the original and it BSOD’s on boot.

When you restore to another box, you don’t have to boot it. What I do is place a second drive in a machine, pull the image to that drive then boot from the first drive, you can then access the files with in the image as a second drive on the machine, never actually booting the image. Then just recapture if any changes are made. No need for having the same hardware.

I see many advantages to FOG and the reason I chose it over the other 2 you listed are as follows:

• It’s free, so no license issues and in a non-profit that is a great thing
• It can run on nearly any hardware, so I have it running on a PC that we were retiring anyway.
• I can select a PC tell it to image and have it WOL anywhere in the building and PXE and image it. I never have to touch it and it is up in less than 20 min.
• I can push software and scripts that may not be easily pushed via GPO
• I can build in other utilities into the PXE menu easily for troubleshooting
• I have a rudimentary inventory system
• I feel that I get better support than some of the paid solutions, and comparing to clonevilla or WDS definitely better support in the community.

Disadvantages in my personal opinion are few:

• Need to have Linux knowledge(although having Linux knowledge is a advantage in the industry)
  The other disadvantages I used to see, when I first found FOG in the .3x days have been corrected/added. I would like to see what others feel are disadvantages.

Hopefully that helps you and glad you had the ability to learn and see what FOG is capable of.

FOG creates an account named “fog” to do all of it’s functions. It is very bad practice to use “fog” as the account for you to login as this account gets a random password set by the installer. I am guessing that the account is getting locked out due to password violations caused by FOG. I would create a different account for you to use such as FOGAdmin or whatever and let FOG use the local “fog” account.

@JJ-Fullmer Not the best solution, but one work around I had done for a program that I had the same issues with is to schedule a task to install the software. I created a snapin that setup a scheduled task (using SCHTASKS) on the client and then kicked off the task before finishing. This allowed the program to come up in the user session and either be interacted with or in your case run the autoit script. I tried to find that script but I must have deleted it because I can not find it anywhere. But that may give you a starting point to try.

No the host would not lose it’s group. Host can be a part of multiple groups. Just make sure you only change the service settings in the “all” group. A group is just a mass change to the hosts contained with in that group.

There are multiple ways to accomplish isolation with access to everything. The first way is to have dual NICs eth0 would be connected to the imaging network and give DHCP to the isolated network, then eth1 would go to production. You would then access the web GUI from the IP address on the production network.

The second way that I have mine setup which gives isolation for sake of avoiding accidental imaging on the production but allows snapins and everything to work well is to have a separate vlan associated to imaging. I have a vlan setup in the tech area, on only one switch, FOG handles DHCP, but the vlan has access tot he rest of the network. This setup allows me to join AD after imaging, and fully configure the freshly imaged machine. But once I deploy the machine I can still push snapins and get login data but no PXE is setup on the production side.

Both have there merits and drawbacks, so it is your choice.

As for throttling you can set that up in the Storage Management page, it is under the bitrate spot, you would enter the number in bits/sec if I am not mistaken

@Tom-Elliott said in Protect Host from Imaging:

Are you guys aware of image ignore?

Just to clarify what Tom is talking about is on the host management page next to the MAC address there are 2 checkboxes the second one is “Ignore MAC for Imaging”

IF you log into your Pushbullet account go to settings and click on “Create Access Token”, Copy the code it gives you. Then go to FOG and click on “Link an Account” under the pushbullet management and copy the code. You should then start receiving notifications.

@Wayne-Workman I don’t think this is really where FOG should go. That adds a lot more into the system that is not within the goals of the project. Printer management right now has nothing to do with the server and quota side. This would entail software that would track all the print jobs. If you are looking for this type of system I would recommend looking in to the solutions already available such as PyKota or QPS(Quota Printing System). Disclaimer, I have never used either of these but they are more targeted to your needs and keeps FOG simpler and more focused.

In my opinion this goes along with a comment you made a few days ago in another discussion.

The little things DO count. This is how Linux developers have been forever, little things count. Little efficiencies here and there add up. With the mindset of “Oh, that little thing, I don’t care”, soon with many of those you have a bloated inefficient system - like Windows.

If we keep adding features tot he system it gets bloated and harder to maintain. We have to remember the @Developers are doing this in spare time and each feature takes away from the core of the system. If someone could work on a plugin to integrate one of the current solutions I think that would be a better solution.

Comparing FOG to a browser it like taking Chrome 5 years ago and comparing it to today. Yes it was snapper 5 years ago, but had less features. Plug ins will slow down a browser just like it could FOG, but then each user has the choice of what they need.

Sorry for the long winded comment, but just wanted to give my thoughts on the matter.

@george1421 @robin correct me if I am wrong, but I have heard of a similar situation. It was a lab in a school that taught both Linux and Windows based classes. It was a poor man’s deep freeze/avoiding having students go into an OS that isn’t needed.

Class A needs Windows, so scheduled task at 7 am is image computer with Windows.
Class B(same lab) needs Linux, so 11am image lab with Linux.

This results in the lab always ready for the class and has a clean image each time.

This could be different software packages, versions of Windows, etc. But this is what I think the request as asking for.

Can you try upgrading to the latest trunk I know as of this morning it was 6094? The init scripts have been a little dynamic in the latest builds as the developers are working on cleaning them up and making them more usable and efficient.

This will not remove current hosts it adds the new hosts. If there are duplicates it will skip those hosts and keep the current one in the database.

@GFm Now to carve out the time to update those over to Partclone. Just a quick FYI in case you are not aware of this. To convert them you don’t have to have the actual machine they go on. I found a spare machine and pulled the image down, and shut off the machine (DO NOT LET IT BOOT AFTER IMAGING) then changed the type in FOG and re-uploaded to the server. Doesn’t matter what hardware you put it on as it never boots into windows.

But on the same token if you have the correct hardware for them it is a perfect time to update the images, I am sure windows updates are way behind. lol

Did you set the pxe options in your DHCP server? OPtions 66 and 67 in Windows.

https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/Modifying_existing_DHCP_server_to_work_with_FOG

you could create a group and search for key words to add hosts then change the image association of the group. That will update each host even if you later delete the group the hosts will still have the new image association.

I just tested this and you can search by the name of the image associated tot he host. So create a group, add member and search for “4000WIN7” and add all the results. Then go to image association in the group change to “4000WIN10” all associated hosts will then be updated

If you try to re-image the computer that you pulled the image from does it boot? If so that indicates the image is good. I would compare the BIOS settings on the machines, especially the HDD settings. I know that I have had issues that if you build the image on a machine set to ACHI and deploy to an ATA machine it will fail. Dell is really bad at have that setting being somewhat randomly assigned from the factory.

@CDown Everyone has their opinion on the best version. I recommend Ubuntu, for anyone not overly familiar with Linux, it is the easiest to find guides usually for troubleshooting. I would go with 14.04 as it is the latest LTS(not counting 16.04 that just came out, as it changed a lot and could break things).

I would recommend setting up with 2 HDD or 2 partitions, one for the OS and database and one for the images, this will avoid the accidental mishap of filling the HDD when capturing an image and locking yourself out of the system. I usually will setup a second drive and mount it to the /images folder before installing FOG this will help FOG install everything in the correct spots and not have to walk through moving the images store later on. Not sure of how many images you will have, but were I am right now, we have images for each model with over a dozen models and a 500gb drive is more than enough. Just a good thing to plan ahead on storage. Let me know if you have an questions along the way.

@Junkhacker If I understand him correctly, the way they stage the machines is by creating a host entry in the DB with the Serial number as the Hostname. With a custom iPXE script the machine PXE boots reads the serial number, finds if there is a host with that serial number and then does the imaging. This can be useful in the sense that they know the serial and not the MAC. When the machine is plugged in the first time you don’t need need to do anything it just works.

@abos_systemax I would recommend using one of the “other” fields for the serial number because the early host name changer does use the hostnmae field and is not configurable.

What version of FOG are you running and what OS?
Are you using a re-sizable image type?