Topics created by Nicholas Williams

Thanks! I will try that…

The easiest to get FOG installed on is currently Ubuntu Desktop 10.04 LTS. Just download and install from the Ubuntu website, follow the instructions to update the OS, then install FOG. Newer versions have minor issues to work around, so if you are new, stay away from them. Also, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS has a wider support base in the FOG forums than other flavors and versions of Linux.

For your server, your hardware requirements depend on how you want to use FOG. I tend to do mass reimaging in the 2 months before school starts with as many as 30 clients at a time at 100MB nics, or 10 clients on 1000MB nics. For this to work, the disk subsystem of the server needs to be able to handle massive read requests. I use a RAID 5 array made of 6 disks. I use a 20GB partition for the OS, and the rest for the /images directory for FOG. This is a more advanced setup and only used because I was on my 4th FOG server setup when I got this newer hardware, so I knew was I was doing. The RAID 5 array is fault tolerant and extremely fast for read operations, which is 99% of what you’ll be doing in FOG.

I use a gigabit switches and a gigabit NIC in the server.

Unless you are skilled in switch/router configurations for multicasting, I would stick with unicasting 10 to 20 clients at a time. The higher the transfer rate from the disks and through the network, the faster the clients complete their imaging process.

If you’re machines are running Windows XP or newer, and have at least 1GB of ram, then you do not need to worry much about FOG client using resources.

It does work across VLANs, with some notes. You have to have IP Helper or DHCP Relay enabled on the router, which you might already have if your current DHCP server can handle requests from all the VLAN’s. If you use ProxyDHCP, you’ll need to add an additional IP Helper/DHCP Relay to the router. You need good uplinks or your FOG performance will suffer. Make sure no uplinks are slower than the NIC speed of your FOG server.

If you plan to do mass deployments, you may slow down parts of the network that are sharing the switches between your FOG server and clients. Imaging 10 to 20 machines via unicast uses a lot of bandwith.

If you plan to multicast, make sure you setup and test your switches and routers so you don’t take down the entire campus network.