Posts made by Kevin

Rachel,

Welcome to the forums, let me ask you a few questions to get a better feeling of what you are looking for and see if you have any questions in return. FOG “Out of the box” works well once setup, but you will have to spend some time tweaking files and configurations to really get it to work at its full potential for your needs. Thankfully, there are quite a few members on these forums that work with FOG daily and would be able assist with almost any problem that comes up. I’ve always believed that the best way to show a product is by giving a demo instead of saying what it can do. But lets get on with some questions:

1. How many computers are in your organization, and are they all from a specific company (Dell, HP) etc

2. Does your institution have any computer labs?

3. Do you have multiple building locations, and if you do, are they directly linked together (fiber line) or connected via VPN?

4. What operating systems will the computers have?

5. Would your FOG server be on a physical box or a VM?

The other things that you can use to persuade your institution to look more towards FOG would be the snap-in system, the virus scanning, memory testing etc. Personally, the selling point when I pitched the idea of FOG to my supervisor was the hardware inventory we could keep on every device (We could tie a serial number of a computer, to a computer name, and then to a user) so if a computer went missing, all we did was type in the computer name or serial number and we could tell who the computer belonged to. While no product will ever be perfect for your needs, FOG has a lot of customization that can be used to make it fit your needs better than the other commercial software. My suggestion would be to setup an isolated network, even two VM’s would work, and setup and test FOG. If you are new to it, it’ll take about 2 hours to fully start from scratch and install the Linux OS, and FOG. Also, FOG 0.33 should be released any day now, so you might also wait for that release.

Is it possible you are using a Windows DHCP server and also a Linux DHCP server? I ask because we have a setup similar to this at my place of employment. Although I don’t know all of the details, I have to assume we have the Windows DHCP server to point different files at boot for different things. For instance, separating TFTP (FOG) boots and FTP (Thin clients) boots etc. And we use our Linux box to actually assign the IP addresses to the clients themselves. I know that if that’s the case, you need to modify your DHCPD.Conf file to point to the TFTP server. We ran into that exact error. And if that is the case, you need to add "[B]next-server X.X.X.X;[/B] and [B]filename “pxelinux.0”[/B]; where X.X.X.X is the IP of your FOG server.

A slot system would be nice to prioritize the installs of the snap-ins. This idea comes from Deploy Studio for Macs. You can decide in what order you would like what application to run. The problem I run into is that I would like a specific program to run last because it needs to restart the machine. So it would be nice if I could have that go last so I don’t have to wait for a reboot, the client to checkin, and start deploying more.

i’ve had real poor results multicasting as well. Imaging one computer with a 9.8 GB image I can do in less than 4 minutes to any machine via unicast. (10 gig backbone on the servers, 1 gig to the PC’s) If I image two computers with unicast at the same time, it jumps to about 6 minutes. If I multicast the same two computers, it takes about 2 hours. Though, if memory serves me correctly, I think switches need to be setup special to do this. I don’t configure the switches at my job, but I seem to remember multicasting being turned off. I’d check to see if you have a switch that supports this.

Layer 3 Cisco switches can do this and are setup this way - [url]http://www.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Cisco_Multi_Cast[/url]
Layer 2&3 Procurve (HP) can do this as well and need to be setup this way - [url]http://www.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=HPMulticast[/url]

FOG is pretty rock solid once it has been setup. What kinds of issues are you thinking you might run into?

Just a thought off the top of my head, have you tried using a different kernel on this model, an older one? Also are you using FOG .32?

Marcelo,

I think you might not understand how FOG works. FOG for imaging is only used to image a computer, similar to Norton Ghost, Acronis True Image, and Clonezilla. FOG will not aid in installing an operating system other than deploying the image onto the drive. If you want to add an option to boot Windows 7 into a “silent mode” this would need to be entered into the answer file when you created it using WAIK. All the settings would need to be configured here, and then the host machine imaged with FOG.

Did you enable your NIC to PXE boot from within your BIOS on the client computer?

If this is in a production environment, did you change your Windows/Linux DHCP servers to point to the corrected IP address as well? I seem to remember running into this as well when I was testing, let me go back through some of me notes and see if you can check a couple other files.

How do you have FOG setup currently? Is it in a VM or on a physical box. Are you testing this at home or at work in a production environment? How did you setup FOG? Did you change the MySQL passwords during the install? Any additional info you can give will help with this problem. Personally, i’ve setup FOG more times than I can count for testing purposes, and currently administer multiple FOG servers at my job. Once it’s setup, it’s rock solid.

Is there a way to allow FOG to single PXE boot without having to set it in the BIOS? The problem we have is that we have around 9-10 thousand computers between multiple sites and none of them have been configured to boot with the NIC first. With our current version of Ghost Suite (old version as it runs 8.2) if we image a computer through the server, it will PXE boot to image itself. Is there a way to configure FOG to do the same thing so we don’t have to go touch all of the computers?

So I seem to be having a brain fart. I can’t get my computers to restart when I change the host name through the web interface. I setup the FOG Service to do host name changes, modified the config.ini to force restarts if needed. If I check the fog.log It sees that the name is going to change, and it will after the service is restarted. I know there is a way to have the computer restart as soon as it sees that the name is supposed to change, but don’t remember where it is or how to get the computers to auto restart. Any ideas?

I’m writing to see what tools, if any, you guys use or prefer to use to monitor your *nix servers. Currently we are running two FOG servers where I work and would like to be kept in the loop in case of failures before it’s really well known to others. We have 2 servers as of now, and may add more down the road. Basically, we’d like to monitor if any of the following fails:

MySQL
Apache
NFS
TFTP
basically all of the core components to make FOG run.

Any suggestions or software that you use/recommend to monitor these functions on the servers?