Ha…yes, I meant virtualize. Thanks for the info! Our current ghost server is a minitower PC that sits right next to my office desktop. It was that way when I got here and I never questioned it. It would make sense to have it in our network center and backed up, etc.

Well I got FOG .32 installed and configured, went with 10.4 LTS and 1) I was amazed at how stupid-simple the installation was. 2) love the dashboard interface.

Now I just need to get our network guy to get the pxe boot options straightened out on our DHCP server and I’ll be ready to start messing with this more in-depth. Essentially, it looks like he set the IP phone settings via server options which set them globally, but if I can get him to limit that to just the scope of IP phones, then my stuff shouldn’t be a problem for the PCs. I just don’t know at this point if there’s a specific reason he did it globally. Doesn’t seem like it should need to be. Even caused problems earlier in the year when some of our network printers stopped working (had to turn off bootp in their settings menu to get them to pull valid IPs)

Thanks for the support thusfar, if things continue to progress, I’m sure you’ll be seeing me around the forum more as I get settled in.

Just to keep the thread going I’ll add my two bits in…doing a small bench deployment this week on an Optiplex 745 with 2GB ram.

if we switch to FOG we will be using it on about 700 computers. Our old ghost server is a simple Core2 Duo tower that I might use, unless they want to visualize it, though I’d have to look at the pros and cons of that.

Kirksec, don’t worry I wouldn’t make any changes without clearing it with the network admin first, I just wanted to gauge what I’m up against before he got back.

I’m thinking maybe the phones and computers have to be on the same vlan since the setup is thus: Ethernet jack > Phone > computer. The phone acts like a switch and passes the connection on to the computer. But I know almost nothing about this kind of stuff, so I’ll end up just running the plans by our guy and see if this can be made to fly or not.

If this is going to be a nonstarter, I don’t even want to waste time testing FOG, so I’m just holding off till I can corner the right guy and ask him about it.

I think for the home/work/public thing you can set that option in AIK as you’re builidng your unattend.xml file for sysprep to use.

Here’s the guide that got me mostly on my feet when I was in your shoes (May 2001 I created my first image for the college where I work)

[url]http://blog.brianleejackson.com/sysprep-a-windows-7-machine-–-start-to-finish-v2[/url]

Hey folks, I’m just dipping my toes in the water with FOG. One issue before I try to get everything running is getting the tftp/pxie stuff set up, which I’m a bit concerned about.

On our Windows DHCP Server (2003) we already have options 66/67 configured to serve up a tftp file to boot our ShoreTel IP phones when they connect to the network. Is this going to be an issue? I am bottom-rung on the IT foodchain, and out network admin is gone for the week so I thought I might pop in here to see what this means for me. I don’t want to configure everything and then not be able to configure the DHCP server for pxe booting. (I won’t make any changes without our network guy’s approval just for protocol, but I wanted to see if this is going to be a major roadblock or a complete non-issue.

Thanks in advance for any commentary or advice you might have to offer.

Thanks Jim. Yesterday before i headed home I put 11.1 on there, but it’s by no means too late to put 10.4 LTS on there. I haven’t even installed FOG. I will definitely go 10.4 LTS, especially if that puts me on a platform that’s shared across more users over here (easier for support, I would guess).

Another question: to have our DHCP server forward the machines on over to FOG for PXIE booting, we would need to configure options 66/67, to specify the server and tftp boot file… Our DHCP server is already configured with those options for our ShoreTel IP phone system we switched to this summer, as the phones download their configuration via tftp when they boot. Is that going to be an issue for us, or can we just configure a different scope to keep the phone system divorced from the image deployment system? This could potentially be a dealbreaker because I don’t want to doink around with mac filtering or anything like that, it needs to be as seamlessly integrated with our network as ghost currently is.

Holy crap, glad to see it’s scalable to such large numbers. Makes my 650-700 seem like peanuts!

I’m getting ready to just start dipping my toes in the water with a small-scale bench deployment.

Downloading Ubuntu 11.1 desktop edition (I wanted a GUI since I barely know linux, it makes me feel better.) --would it be a lot better to install server for the full deployment? or does it not matter much?

Second, for my test run, all I’ve got for hardware is a Dell 745, which is a midrange Core2Duo, with 2GB RAM. I think this should be fine but wanted to make sure.

Are there any problems with Ubuntu 11 and FOG that I should be aware of?

Any tips and tricks would be appreciated.

OH and can you expound a bit more about “driver packs” ? The only time I’ve heard these referenced was with SmartDeploy but it was specific to their product. I am not well-versed with driver injection/AIK/Sysprep at all, I do a very basic Sysprep when I split off our 9 models from the main master, but that’s it.

Thanks, Raff, I appreciate you taking the time to stop in and give me that information. So I take it FOG is probably on the up-swing in it’s product cycle. One thing I didn’t want to do was switch over to a system that is then defunct with no development in a year or two.

Thanks, yep I saw that, just wanted to see if there were any special “Gotcha!” in my situation. If I have time in the next week or two I’ll do a bench test with it, get it working to the extent that I have Ghost working now, then tackle the challenge of getting a single golden master to send out to all platforms ready.