Greetings,

I’ve been using FOG for a little while now and where I work, we buy PCs that typically come with either an OEM Windows 7 license or Windows 8 with downgrade rights to 7. FOG handles retail or volume keys fine using the FOG client, but this won’t work for these OEM licenses or downgrade right installs.

So I made myself a little SetupComplete script about a year ago that lets us quickly clean image these PCs and activate Windows the same way the OEM does when they arrive on our doorstep sysprep’d from the factory.

You can read about how to do this yourself here, but I wrote a version that might suit FOG Project fans.

What it does:

• You select the manufacturer of the PC (or use the new “automatic mode”)
• The script identifies the edition (Home Premium, Professional, etc) and installs the corresponding OEM cert and key
• Verifies that activation was successful
• Starts up the FOG client service

It’s written in Batch and it’s messy, but it works. Feel free to fork it to make improvements, or open an issue on Github if you discover a bug.

Cheers!

For now, you can view the FOG Edition of the script on Github:
https://github.com/mgiljum/Windows7-OEM-Activator/tree/FOG-Edition

Or you can download it directly here (just be sure check the README.md
https://github.com/mgiljum/Windows7-OEM-Activator/archive/FOG-Edition.zip

Note: the “Non-FOG” edition of the script (can be found on Github) does the same thing, it just doesn’t start/stop the FOG service or come packaged nicely with a SetupComplete.cmd template.

Disregard. I found the issue.

This server was migrated from a backup, and the backup had my old FTP password in there. Updated the master storage node with the correct, new password, page loaded fine.

Oh wow…I originally asked the onsite tech to boot a client to see if he got the Fog boot menu…

…he was rebooting the storage node. Sigh…

Never mind, guys. Thanks anyway.

It would be great to have an option to disable replication during certain times. Where I work we replicate over an MPLS link that doesn’t have a lot of bandwidth, and all of it needs to be reserved during the day for production stuff.

However, at night or on the weekends is fair game for doing our backups, network discovery tasks, etc. It would be nice to be able to go into FOG and schedule times at which the FOG replication becomes enabled.

Note: Right now I’m doing this using cron (simply disabling replication service at a certain time), so I know that’s an option here, but it would be nice to have it built in. I’m sure I’m not the only person who might use it.

This update resolved getting to the web interface, but I still get a 500 error when trying to get to the Log Viewer.

After updating the node in question (despite it failing at “Restarting apache2 for fog vhost”), replication has been fixed.

@Tom-Elliott That did the trick!

That is, after I mistook the interface name “eno1” for “en01”. I should really go to bed.

In the settings for the image, is it set to a re-sizable image type?
If yes, under Images > List all Images, is the Image Size on Client smaller than the hard drive size you’re attempting to deploy it to?

@Sebastian-Roth Actually in giving me that suggestion, I found the issue. I have a Tomato router that I use for DHCP, and I misread the Wiki when it shows how to set up that for PXE. I used the wrong boot file:

dhcp-boot=pxelinux.0,,192.168.1.201

Where it should have been:

dhcp-boot=undionly.kpxe,,192.168.1.201

Made that change, and bingo.

Thanks all for your help!

@Tom-Elliott Sure, updTing now

@tom-elliott I’m having this issue as well. Login screen appears pretty quickly, but logging in takes at least 3-5 minutes and all UI navigation takes several seconds to up to a minute to load.

It would be nice if we could set the client’s time zone on a per-group or even per-client basis.

@george1421 I’d be really interested in your setup, because that’s exactly what I would ultimatly want. Our setup would be much simpler, if it’s possible to do it this way, but we have several physical locations and one OU per location.

How might I go about getting FOG to change the OU based on location? I am using the plugin. Might you be able to share a redacted version of the scripts you’re using?

We have multiple OU destinations for computers joined to our domain via FOG, and right now I’m using a text file as a cheat sheet for those OU paths, which I copy and paste into the host settings.

What would be nice is if we could define aliases to use for each OU, rather than having to type/paste the full OU path each time we set up a new host, or not have to put them in the same OU every time.

Perhaps aliases could be defined in FOG settings, and then the user could select from a dropdown list in the Active Directory settings for the host? Correct me if I’m wrong, but this would be as simple as a constant being defined for the OU path string when the user creates an alias.

@george1421 I completely forgot I have a USB ethernet adapter. I’ll give that a try.

I’ve got a notebook I need to image from FOG, but alas, the ethernet adapter is dead.

Is there a way to manually write a standard single disk/resizable Windows 7 image that I have on my FOG server if I copied it to a portable HDD? I’ve used Clonezilla in the past, but I’m sure with resizable images, there might be some extra steps involved.

Here’s the image as it is on my FOG server:

@george1421 Well, acpi=off in the kernel options did the trick. Must be one of those finicky models. Thanks!

@george1421 It’s BIOS, yes, but I’ve never had to add that argument for any other computer using BIOS. Regardless, I’ll give it a whirl and report back the results.

Server

• FOG Version: 1.3.5
• OS: Centos 7 x64

Client

• Service Version: N/A
• OS: Windows 7

Description

I did a quick registration on a HP Z400 workstation, and that worked fine, but when I attempted to deploy an image I got the following:

So I then stopped the task, deleted the host, and did a full registration instead. The registration worked okay, and the deploy task got a little further this time, but then it halted here:

Any idea what’s going on? I’m using undionly.kpxe, if that’s relevant.

@Wayne-Workman thanks, Wayne!