@Wayne-Workman Just thought you’d appreciate this.
I added a video from the channel to the snapin management page https://fogproject.readthedocs.io/en/latest/management/index.html#snapin-management

Oh how to use the thing,
Copy paste into your favorite text editor (sublime text, notepad++, scite, or what have you) and save as ImagePrep.bat (or whatever you want as long as it’s .bat) I reccomend having it on a file share so you can run it from there and always have the most up to date version ready to run on a computer you want to upload a hardware independent image.

I have many other scripts I’ve implemented into my FOG imaging workflow that I am happy to share if people want to see them.
Like a firstLogon or a one time automatic admin login so you can have a firstLogon/setupcomplete script without sysprep.
Backup and restore scripts for user files and settings when migrating a user’s local files to a new image
And so many more. I’m still working to make them more universal and I really really want to find a way to not have plain text passwords in them for mounting shares with net use. (Virtual Smart Cards maybe, but they currently look complicated)

@Wayne-Workman That would work, but I feel like it’s kind of a bandaid to the issue rather than a real fix. We didn’t have to reinstall php for every fog update before, why do we suddenly need to do it now? Granted I do like the idea of contributing something to the official fog code, even if it does get taken out later…

@Wayne-Workman I have since updated this script.
I don’t have a way to dynamically update all users. It essentially copies the neccesarry app data folders that won’t break cortana/start
to the default profile and then copies that default profile to a network share for deploying via a fog snapin with another script that takes arguements of the name of the profile you make.

Here let me just take out my credentials and share name and post a copies of my current create and apply windows 10 profile scripts…

p.s. I recently discovered that profiles made on 64 bit windows won’t work on 32 bit windows. So you have to create separate versions from 32 bit and 64 bit windows installs if you have different archs in your environment.

@Sebastian-Roth I tried to install that theme per the instructions in their git to no avail. I tried following some of the example site’s configs too and haven’t got it to work yet. I think it’s worth getting, just keeping you updated.

Edit

It wasn’t working because I had a dyslexic moment and because they were missing steps in their instructions

installs with pydata-sphinx-theme but then you define it as your theme with pydata_sphinx_theme those silly underscores and dashes.
I also had to add a html_context section and a html_theme_options sections in the conf.py. And I had to manually copy over the _templates files from the theme’s repo into our project. But I got it working. It changes things up a little bit but it’s fixable, it’s just a question of what makes the most sense.

There are still some kinks to work out but I think I like it.

It ends up looking like this

The front page is still very much a rough draft. But we could have something like this as exists in many other pages using this theme. Note the little panels. I figure we could have links to each top level section with a brief summary of what information is in each section.

This also changes it from combining pages into one index to more individual pages. It can be a bit easier to navigate this way and you still keep that information grouped together nicely in this theme. This is a nice find @Sebastian-Roth. All the themes I played with outside the default removed the read-the-docs version modal. This one is pretty great

@Bob-Henderson Well just sysprep is one method. I just add in a lot of extra stuff. Like cleaning up windows update, making sure chkdsk isn’t going to need to run when you upload. Cleaning up various temporary files, creating a imageversion log, making sure the time is synced properly to prevent possible domain join issues, rearming windows activation, defragging the hard drive, removing all drivers manually. Sometimes sysprep doesn’t work, or sometimes it removes more than you want. I’ve done both with an without sysprep. I have found without sysprep and utilizing the methods in this script to make my image hardware independent to be much faster and smoother.
But to each their own I just thought some other people might find something useful in it because It’s full of little snippets that answer questions and problems I had for years.

@Toby777 Are you on the latest trunk?
Download and upload of all image formats is working for me on nvme on the latest.

@x23piracy Does the share require a login?
If it isn’t a public share it probably won’t work.

@Sebastian-Roth @Jurgen-Goedbloed I have got the new theme working with scrolling toc and all. I think the top menu needs a little tlc https://fogproject.readthedocs.io

Do we want to stick with this theme or revert back to the default theme, I know @Jurgen-Goedbloed mentioned he didn’t like it as much. I don’t want to go changing the readme with the structural changes if we’re not gonna stick with this theme. Personally I didn’t like it at first but it’s grown on me and it’s pretty easy to navigate.

@Wayne-Workman I should add that it doesn’t remove driver files that are ready for plug n play.
It just uninstalls all devices to make it hardware independent, just like sysprep does. So if you use sysprep you would use the sysprep function instead of the hardware independence function.

Something else I do is when I do find a driver that is missing from windows 10 I get the inf file for it and add it to my image’s plug n play store with the command pnputil -a path/to/driver.inf I try to limit doing this to only network drivers because once you get that far windows update in windows 10 usually takes care of the rest.

I would firstly strongly recommend upgrading to trunk. It includes the latest version of ipxe which alone could fix the issue.
But I have a few other ideas from my tests of difficult networks that I’ve gotten FOG working on.

So if I understand correctly you already have reserved ips on your windows dhcp for the hosts you are testing. Does FOG also have a reserved IP address in the dhcp? Something I’ve had good luck with is giving FOG a reservation on the DHCP server (On the same subnet as the computers it’s imaging, even if you have seperate subnets for servers and workstations) and a DNS entry too and then set option 66 with the FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name/Hostname.domain). This could be part of the issue here, but since you’re getting as far as you are it probably isn’t, but it could help since it may help the with getting the dhcp address.

So in summary of that idea

• Give FOG a dhcp reservation
• Give FOG a dns reservation
• Set Option 66 to hostname

Now A separate idea, even though you do have the dhcp method working. If it continues to give you grief you can give proxy dhcp via dnsmasq a try. I’ve had luck with it in environments that don’t like being edited. You typically don’t want to use poth the dhcp option and dnsmasq, however in some harder to modify network configurations, it is helpful to have both running. But I’ve also seen where one breaks the other, so just be aware of that when trying. So if you try this method, I would try unsetting option 66 and 67. And if it doesn’t work try setting the options again.

I put some information about configuring dnsmasq in a post in this thread
https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/6262/tftp-problems/43

There is also more information in the wiki
https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/ProxyDHCP_/dnsmasq-_DRAFT
https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/Using_FOG_with_an_unmodifiable_DHCP_server/Using_FOG_with_no_DHCP_server

Hopefully that’s helpful in some way.

@John-Johnson I ran into a similar error.
This answer is similar to the other’s but I had to run the following powershell script on every local user to get sysprep to work.

$AppsList = "Microsoft.Bing" , "Microsoft.BingFinance" , "Microsoft.BingMaps" , "Microsoft.BingNews"`
            , "Microsoft.BingSports" , "Microsoft.BingTravel" , "Microsoft.BingWeather" , "Microsoft.Camera"`
            , "microsoft.microsoftskydrive" , "Microsoft.Reader" , "microsoft.windowscommunicationsapps"`
            , "microsoft.windowsphotos" , "Microsoft.XboxLIVEGames" , "Microsoft.ZuneMusic"`
            , "Microsoft.ZuneVideo" , "Microsoft.Media.PlayReadyClient"

ForEach ($App in $AppsList)
{
    $PackageFullName = (Get-AppxPackage $App).PackageFullName
    if ((Get-AppxPackage $App).PackageFullName)
    {
        Write-Host "Removing Package: $App"
        remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -online -packagename $PackageFullName
        remove-AppxPackage -package $PackageFullName
    }
    else
    {
        Write-Host "Unable to find package: $App"
    }
}

See this post for more info
https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/5873/windows-10-unattend-xml-sysprep-answer-file-challenge/15

The theme has been reverted for now. I have made a top level tree and structured things per the sphinx and rtd recommendations.
Since it’s now following the structure it’s designed to use, switching themes down the road should be easy breezy.

@Wayne-Workman said in Image Prep Script:

@JJ-Fullmer said in Image Prep Script:

pnputil

Can you tell us more about that? I’m thinking I’m going to have to build a universal image now.

What @jayrob86 posted was some good stuff.

My basic explanation would be.

pnputil can add, install, or add and install drivers to a host.
If you use pnputil -a driver.inf you will add a driver to the plug n play store but not install it. This makes it so you can add drivers to your image without losing hardware independence.
If you use pnputil -i -a driver.inf it will install that driver for you and add it to the driverstore. Which is what I would use for a driver installer script.
You can also do recursive searches with for loops.
like this one that would go through the first level of folders in a folder and install all inf files in each folder (to do all subfolders would take more loops or something)… (disclaimer: untested, just doing it off the top of my head right quick, syntax may be wrong, but I’ve done it before, should really make this a sharedFunction script)
run from path you’re searching
use %%F (or i, or whatever variable floats your boat) in a script but just 1 % in command line)
%F= each line of output of dir /b which is just a folder name list (/b takes out the full path, makes it like ls) Then the loop just takes the foldername*.inf to install all inf files in that folder.
FOR /F %F in ('dir /b') do pnputil -i -a %F\*.inf

For drivers in a universal image I use that loop on downloaded drivers with just -a for any model that has drivers that are missing from windows 10 by default. A word of caution though, be careful with things like intel rapid storage technology drivers, and other hard drive/raid/sata controller type drivers. Sometimes having multiple in the store ends up having the wrong one install and then there are problems. So I try to limit it to simpler drivers, like network drivers, graphics drivers can work too, however trying to preinstall all nvidia drivers from a single nvidia driver download will take up a good chunk of GB of your image. So I stopped trying to do that one. But other than those 2 caveats of graphics drivers taking up space and IRST drivers having occasional conflicts, it’s a pretty great practice for universalizing images. Another important note, that I may have mentioned earlier, some inf files reference sys files and cab files in subdirs or the same dir. So you can’t always just copy the inf file to a share or something like that, so it’s good to install it from the original location that you find it in so it can copy those required files to the driver store as needed.

So some more examples would be the sol and heci drivers for a HP 8000 elite, or the latest intel network driver IL29 or something like that. Chipset drivers, monitor drivers, touchscreen drivers, printer drivers etc. And from what I understand, and I’m not 100% on this, but basically it puts drivers in 2 places on adding and installing. I think that when it’s installed it creates a C:\Windows\inf\oem#.inf file and when it adds it, it puts it in the driver store at C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository but I may have that backwards. But those are the 2 locations that drivers will go.

The other advantage to this method, that I think I mentioned before, is that it skips over having to install any extra software from the manufacturer. You can usually use 7zip to extract any driver installer exes and find the inf files you need.

Hopefully that answers your question enough to utilize it.

@Tom
Trunk isn’t beta in the traditional sense. I would strongly recommend upgrading to it. If there are problems you post it on the forum and often the issue is fixed in a manner of hours.

@csuther3 Are you copying from a profile that already has cortana broken? Because it doesn’t fix it in that manner. You have to start with a fresh standard windows profile, then customize it.

@george1421 I don’t know off the top of my head sadly. I don’t do much with multicast. But multicastsession is one of the apiobjects. So @Rivybeast you can give my powershell module a try. Once you’ve got it setup (i.e. Install-Module FogApi; Set-FogServerSettings;)

You could mess with the multicastsession coreobject.
A quick test I go this

 $test = New-FogObject -type object -coreObject multicastsession
VERBOSE: Building uri and api call
VERBOSE: Pulling settings from settings file
VERBOSE: Pulling settings from settings file
VERBOSE: Building Headers...
VERBOSE: Building api call URI...
VERBOSE: removing body from call as it is null
VERBOSE: POSTing  to/from http://fog-server/fog/multicastsession/create
VERBOSE: POST http://fog-server/fog/multicastsession/create with 0-byte payload
VERBOSE: received -1-byte response of content type application/json
VERBOSE: finished api call
C:\Users\jfullmer\git\admin_scripts [master ≡ +1 ~3 -0 !]> $test


id             : 4
name           :
port           : 0
logpath        :
image          : @{imageTypeID=; imagePartitionTypeID=; id=; name=; description=; path=; createdTime=; createdBy=;
                 building=; size=; osID=; deployed=; format=; magnet=; protected=; compress=; isEnabled=;
                 toReplicate=; srvsize=; os=; imagepartitiontype=; imagetype=}
clients        : 0
sessclients    : 0
interface      :
starttime      : 0000-00-00 00:00:00
percent        : 0
stateID        : 0
completetime   : 0000-00-00 00:00:00
isDD           : 0
storagegroupID : 0
anon3          :
anon4          :
anon5          :
state          : @{id=; name=; description=; order=; icon=}
imageID        :

Which may give you some more ideas. The output at the end may be some of what you might be able to specify in the json data of a post call (New-FogObject). @Tom-Elliott May be able to help more as far as what data is needed to create a multicast session in the api.

Based on these quick tests though I’d say there’s some high hopes.

Released version 1.6, nothing new just fixed the hash/signing issue on the psd1 file. Should fix the error that occurred during install saying the hash didn’t match or something like that in 1.5

The easiest thing to do is probably just leave it as default /images but then either mount the HDD to the path /images in your /etc/fstab nano /etc/fstab or make a symlink with sudo ln -s /path/to/hdd/images /images I personally use the symlink method. In my case I just wasn’t paying attention when I partition my drive and made a /home data partition of 400 GB and a / partition of 80 GB. I realized too late that this meant that I only had 80 GB for images… Since I didn’t feel like editing the partition table or starting over, I just moved the /images folder to a folder in /home/fogRootSystem and made a symlink to point /images to that folder and it worked like a charm.

Otherwise you also would want to edit your /etc/exports and make sure that it is pointing the nfs directory to your /images (Fog might do this for you if you specified it during install or in the gui)
You also would want to consider moving the snapins directory as it would normally be in /opt/fog/snapins and if you have a lot of scripts and large installers, than that directory can get pretty big too. Granted any of these would run faster on an ssd.

Hope that helps.

@Wayne-Workman said in Cortana/Windows Search breaks in default profile:

@Arrowhead-IT can you make a git repo with your two scripts in it, with a read me and a GNU GPLv3 license?

I made the repo where they will go.

I was trying to decide whether I wanted to make one repo or a bunch for a few other fog-snapin/image prep type scripts.
For now it’s just the one repo. I’d prefer it to be in the fog-project group of repos, but it doesn’t have to be. I’ll link to the fog-project repos for sure though.

https://github.com/darksidemilk/Create-and-Deploy-Windows-Default-Profiles