@wayne-workman just a note (apologies for gravedig).
I never got round to upgrading FOG over the summer and TBH I might look at building a brand new FOG server to supplement the old one.
However, we are rolling out windows 10 1709 and am STILL using FOG 5370 with the legacy client. Everything works just fine as before (I cannot remember when I installed 5370 but it is quite a few years ago now…)
yes it can do what you want. FOG stores all of its data in an easy to read database. We looked at automating FOG from another of our applications in the past (but didn’t bother going forward as it didn’t actually save us much admin). For FOG tasks (scheduled, instant, delayed etc), simply insert something into the fog.scheduledTasks database for a scheduled task etc (the fog.taskTypes gives you an indication of what you can do). The backup process kicks in from the pxe by default in FOG. You can set a task to reboot the PC too in FOG if you wish.
Obviously it is a DISK BACKUP not an incremental backup. Expect the backups to take many minutes if you run high compression. Even low compression is a heavy task.
It will be a network backup, local backups (to USB etc) will not be possible unless you configure multiple storage nodes per PC (not practical).
If you can SSH to your NAS then go ahead and try (after backing up of course)! Quite a few NAS do support an awful lot of things; looking at my own synology, that has a dashboard where you can install web servers, MySQL, bulletin boards - all sorts really so it isn’t too much of a stretch to imagine FOG can be installed on the NAS. It all comes down to what flavour of Linux the NAS is running and how friendly it is to repo’s vs recompiling…
We are using Fog old trunk 5370. It has worked on everything I have thrown at it and it has a few of my own hacks in there (murdering partition tables on fresh never used drives for example). I am looking at moving to 1.4.0 but I have one reservation, is the fog client enforced? We still use the legacy client as I never had much success with the non-legacy version. There are many machines on our network using the legacy client.
@george1421 yes. That way the fog server considers /images local so the “defaultmember” pie chart works just fine.
Dell XPS 11 (2x USB3.0 ports and wifi - no onboard LAN) just imaged successfully with a LAN7500 USB NIC. I tried all sorts of NIC without success, both with the BIOS, UEFI and various ROM-o-MATIC USB configurations. In the end a good old USB2 startech USB21000S2 worked from the BIOS (legacy) without issue. I didn’t try via UEFI.
Inventory was OK. Imaging windows 10 dropped twice but picked up again (“kevent 2 may have been dropped”).
Posting just in case others are trying to handpick USB NIC
@george1421 I “cheesed” the dashboard in our FOG by mounting the image folder on the FOG server as NFS from my synology NAS (rather than add another storage node). Using an 815+ here and have been for a while.
well as far as “stable” goes ive been using build 5370 for 3 months. Ive rolled out a couple of hundred windows 8.1 images - all of which are unattended from lan boot -> AD joined “ctrl-alt-del” screen (I use snappydriver via a script on OOBE boot).
I guess later trunk have other fixes but since that build worked for me (and works for me) I have no reason to update yet. I’d give trunk a test in your lab and decide for yourself; it is a world away from 1.2 - if only for the speed increase (not quite double the speed but I’d be surprised if you don’t notice it)
old topic but I had a similar issue, I simply created a DHCP reservation for the problem laptops (I only had a few) and set the 67 for those laptops on the reservation. That way I could leave fog alone and let the DHCP service give the appropriate details out (and being a reservation it is a permanent solution as far as I care).
OptiPlex 780 works for me too. BIOS is stock (A01) fog is trunk. We have 330, 360, 760 and 780, no issues (the 330’s are the twitchiest, very fussy on hard drives). I have had no errors at all in FOG imaging any OptiPlex machines. In fact, ive not had a machine failed for a very long time (modern laptop, old 0.32 kernel at the time)
DHCP is server 2012R2
A note that clonezilla works using the method.
We have a lot of “site wide” software that is quicker to add to the image than GPO install afterwards -Office, Serif software suite, interactive whiteboard software with lots of resources (easier to put on the image than strain the network on a central install believe it or not!). Snappydriver adds 10Gb of drivers too (which is deleted afterwards). I also don’t bother removing the swapfile (hibernation is disabled so no hiberfil.sys); The swapfile compresses anyway (anecdotal testing).
Snappydriver is what speeds things up though. Imaging is 10-15 mins (less on unicast), I used to use “driverpacks” in windows 7 and the driverpacks stage alone would take 20 to 30 minutes on a decent system. Snappydriver is 5 minutes flat and ive yet to find a machine that HASNT had a driver picked up.
The system was geared purely on speed not size - I don’t mind having a huge image if it means the client gets from dead to CTRL-ALT-DEL faster. WSUS will obviously put a few updates on there but I do try to keep on top of the golden image where I can (office updates are the worst as you need to remove/reinstall office with the updates in the “update” folder on an AuditMode PC)
WSUS Offline Update is a good way to grab office updates for inclusion in the installation/updates folder (make sure your OCT file is the FIRST one alphabetically though or you wont get the customisation)
Since this is general chat and there is a lack of thanks, then a big set of thank you to the devs and helpers on here, in particular Tom Elliot, CML and Wayne Workman.
I have just finished multicasting 2 rooms of 25 PCs each simultaneously with another 50 ongoing now and another 100 to do this afternoon and a final 100 on Monday (these are harder as they have supplementary software to install afterwards). No issues and no stress (3GbMin multicast speed for those who are interested switches are cascaded netgear GS748TS, I can unicast at 9GbMin). Culmination of a months worth of on-off upgrading!
All automated from PXE first boot with fog sending the WOL too. Image goes straight to CTRL-ALT-DEL after image, OOBE, driver install, rename, join domain. No keypresses whatsoever.
FOG trunk 5370 (not the latest I know)
Centos 6.7 guest on a clustered 2k12R2 host. Guest has 2gb Ram, 2 cores assigned (htop shows the cores are not stressed)
Image is a windows 8.1 sysprepped with snappydriver driver script on OOBE - 35gb real size.
Golden image created as a VM
Network core cisco 3750 cascaded into netgear 748TS into 724TS. Jumbo frames enabled, QOS disabled temporarily to allow full multicast (to hell with normal traffic!).
(edit - storage for images is from a synology RS815+ running in pure iscsi block mode, vm host has a VHDX saved on it. Drives are standard sata 7200 3Tb drives in Raid6 so not the fastest but good enough to use Gb lan. Connection is multilink but for redundancy not speed - not that a single image pull would use MPIO anyway)
25minutes from switch on to usable CTRL-ALT-DEL
just a note, Ubuntu is not a great choice for a VM in hyper-v. Integration services are not up to scratch (legacy NIC, SMP, and clustering issues). Legacy NIC is limited to 100Mbs I believe and since you are only getting 1000Mb/Min this would seem to be the case (about 133Mbs so 100Mb+compression throughput). I have screenshots of 9gb/Min constant using centos 6.7 guest in a clustered VM on 2k12R2 host - this does not use a legacy NIC and has full integration services.
also if you are creating a “universal” image and can spare an extra 10gb or so then look at “snappy driver” for deploying drivers. That is what I use for my “universal image”.
for our Windows 7 image I did the following:
*set up our “unattend.xml” using a workstation.
*from within a hyper-v guest, install fresh W7 and boot into audit mode.
*install base software (office, serif, any other site licenced products).
*install FOG client
*copy snappy drivers and download the packs.
*configure setupcomplete.cmd to run my snappy driver .bat. This BAT autoruns snappy driver to install MISSING drivers, then deletes the folder of drivers when completed.
*windows update
*copy the unattend.xml created earlier.
(I then “backup” my VM at this point so I can come back to it later)
*sysprep shutdown and generalise
*capture the image into FOG then restore VM from backup ready for the updates next time.
To get snappy drivers to install, simply open it, update the packs, then in your setupcomplete.cmd call
SDI_x64_Rxxx.exe -autoinstall -autoclose -license
The batchfile also cascades into an RD and shutdown reboot at the end of it so it is self cleaning. NOTE I also shutdown the FOGClient service in my setupcomplete.cmd as I DONT want it to join the domain as soon as it sniffs the network! It will join the domain (and rename etc) AFTER the drivers have been installed and rebooted. The batch file also ensures our KMS key is added and I run slmgr /ato. I also add the office KMS key and activate that at the end too, whilst there are default KMS keys when products are installed, I have other images with MAK keys as some of our machines are destined to be unplugged from the network (exam machines etc).
My image is a monster, weighing in at 40gb but works on every single machine I have thrown it on and they are pretty much ready to go (WSUS always has more updates on first boot)
for crying out loud, im blind as a bat. Sorry. With all the “fog.” I missed my own on the bottom.
no problem, i’ll update trunk later on this week and try again.
I posted this in response to another question but figured it would be better raising it here. When I update the group of “all my PCs” it doesn’t “encode” the password for AD (not the legacy password - that is “already encoded” and does save & work just fine). Going into any of the members from the group and clicking the “eye” shows the password I saved in clear.
If the password is typed and saved on a single host then it correctly gets encoded (after clicking the eye to see encoded text).
I used the GUI “ipxe new menu entry” to boot to a freedos ISO (made with a modified IMG). the syntax I used for the parameters was
initrd http://${fog-ip}/fog/service/ipxe/boot.iso
chain memdisk iso raw
And this worked just fine (look, I like DOS okay, and, well, reasons, leave me alone 
). However, I made a spleling mistake in the “menu item” and don’t know how to edit this. Which file does it save the menu items in so I can go and edit? I cant seem to find a GUI entry to edit self made menu entries.