A note for those of you who use FOG on VMware. vSphere 5.5 was just announced 2 weeks which looks to provide pretty significant improvements over 5.1. Thankfully Workstation 10 already has these improvements so you can do some testing! You can review what’s new here

[URL=‘http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2013/09/a-summary-of-whats-new-in-vsphere-5-5.html’] [SIZE=2]http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2013/09/a-summary-of-whats-new-in-vsphere-5-5.html[/SIZE][/URL]

It was to long to post here.

We are all here because FOG has helped us save countless hours of imaging and deploying on our networks. I’m posting this here to see what other opensource software you may use at home or at work. Just throwing out some examples:

Untangle
ClearOS
Zentyal
PfSense
Spiceworks

Anyone use anything like those listed above? Of course there is a lot more than just that, but those are some big players in the free/opensource world. I’d love to hear some feedback for those who use them. I personally use Zentyal and PfSense and love them.

So i’ve seen people post switching their servers over to gpxelinux for faster boot times, and using http instead of tftp. I now am running into a situation where we might need to use a tftp server at work for other programs, and our FOG server might be going away. From what i’ve read, you can use gpxelinux to boot over http instead of tftp. However, from when i’ve played with it, i’ve never actually been able to boot anything with gpxelinux. I get either vesamenu.32 errors, or that a URL syntax has been detected, and just fails. So i’m here to see if someone could write up a how to on how to switch FOG over to gpxe completely instead of regular pxe. I know people say it’s as easy as replacing pxelinux with gpxelinux, and some config changes, but I have yet to see anything work. Any write up would be appreciated!

If anyone is interested, I’ve got a “beta” .32 Bypass Host file setup that will allow you to image a machine right from the PXE menu, based on the .32 version of FOG, upgraded from .29. I can post this on the sourceforge site if there is enough interest for it. I’m still calling this a “beta” as even though all the CHKDSK lines have been removed from the file, the machines still run it. However, i’ve re-imaged a lot of VM’s and all have worked so far running my updated version of the bypass.

My co-workers have been asking if there is a way to disable checkdisk after a machine is imaged. It doesn’t bother me at all, but it is a concern to them. We run the bypass which shouldn’t be a big concern, but wasn’t sure if there was any config file we could modify to make them happy.

So, now that Ubuntu 12.04 is out, and has been for a couple months, i’m starting to look at making the jump to 12.04. Now the fun question, is there really any advantage to using 64 over 32 bit Ubuntu? My test box I have setup for FOG is running 10.04 LTS 64 bit, however, our production server (which has quite a bit more power) is only running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 32 bit. Does anyone prefer either architecture to another? If we switch to a 64 bit OS, will there be any noticeable difference to imaging either to upload or download?

So i’ve been away for a while. Been getting certs like crazy, so lots of studying. Interestingly enough, i’ve worked with a lot of imaging both on PC and Macs. I’ve been using DeployStudio for the Macs, and a combination of WDS, SCCM, and MDT for Windows (Lite Touch and Zero Touch deployments). Both work extremely well for what they are, once they are properly configured, but that’s a different story :) However, both products are based heavily on tasks to deploy the image and software. While both imaging solutions work, they do it in different ways, at least the way I was using them.

PC deployments - You image the machine with a very basic image. You install 7, sysprep it once you get it installed, and that’s your base image. Then MDT and SCCM would take over and basically run a script that would install the applications in order based on your config. It would keep installing and restarting as needed until everything was completed.

Mac deployments - The Macs seemed to be almost identical with DeployStudio. You could do a “traditional sysprep” on the machine to give you the default image. Then you create a task list to do various tasks while the machine is being imaged. For instance you would set the task to Image the machine > download/install updates > install extra software that wasn’t in the image > Bind to AD or OD. All this would be done while the machine was netboot’d to the server. After that list completed, the machine would restart and everything would be good.

So to me it seems like more mainstream imaging programs are going modular with using tasks, even down to the individual PC’s. So it would be nice to see if it would be possible to start seeing if FOG would start to incorporate this as well. That’s on my wish list, if only I could being to code that :)