I’m lucky in that I don’t have to support multiple locations. The switch will be local to the server (which sits under the bench) - I keep everything completely isolated in order that our IT Security peeps can sleep soundly at night

Have been imaging Windows XP machines for a good few years now and Fog has been superb. At the end of this month I need to be imaging Windows 8.1 Panasonic CF-G1 Toughpads hence the change to Fog 1.2 and the update to the hardware.

I’m just going through the same process. Currently running an HP N36L Microserver and imaging around 60 machines a week at one location but will need to image a lot more than that per week in the near future… have just ordered a small Fujitsu Xeon E3-1226 based minitower server with 8Gb ram along with a pair of 1Tb ssd’s which I’m intending to run in software raid 1 for the /images storage. The server has two 1Gb network interfaces so I’ve scounged a redundant Cisco 3750 switch from our networks people and will bond the adapters and run a pair of aggregated ports on the switch.

Came in at around £1000 all in. I’d have it all up and running by now but the supplier sent the kit to the wrong office friday last… sigh.

I get this problem sometimes with drives that are brand new following replacement. In my case (Panasonic Toughbook CF19’s) the drives are in easily removable caddies so my workaround is to put them into a machine temporarily and boot the unit from a Gparted live cd, then just create a default MSDOS boot sector. HTH

But does it continue to boot and function correctly ? I see this all the time when performing tasks on Panasonic CF19 Toughbooks - it’s just the kernel trying to load various drivers etc but telling you that the driver didn’t find it’s associated hardware.

HTH
Robin

I don’t see why not - but whether using an SSD on a machine running XP is going to work well I’m not so sure as XP doesn’t support the TRIM command for garbage collection. You may see reduced SSD life (on early SSD’s anyway - newer ones may I’ve read be less susceptible to this). YMMV…

I’d upload the image as resizable assuming it’s a single partition you’re wanting to back up.

Cheers
Robin

No need, you can continue to deploy your original images

Cheers
Robin

I believe that it’s necessary to manually edit the SQL database table… not something I’ve tried so sorry I can’t be of much help.

No doubt that somebody far cleverer than me will be along in a moment with some sage advice.

Cheers
Robin

Must resist… No ! I’m gonna have to go build a sandpit server now

Hi Terry,

Take a look here : [url]http://www.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/Modifying_the_Init_Image[/url]

Once you have access to all of the scripts it’s pretty easy to add the linux command (for the life of me I can’t remember what it was as I’m a confirmed Linux noob to my eternal shame !) so that at the end of the process it’ll sit there and wait for a keypress.

HTH
Cheers
Robin

I don’t think you need a powerful server - I’m using an HP Microserver (AMD N36L processor) with 3Gb ram and 2 x 1Tb sata drives in software raid 1 so not exactly a Ferrari… It has no problems imaging 10 machines concurrently and I’ve not seen any memory leak issues. I’m on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and FOG 0.31 running the 3.4 kernel.

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working on a build for a laptop (Toughbook CF19 Mk5) which has a 320Gb hdd split into 4 partitions:
[LIST]
[]Boot partition 200Mb
[]Two Windows XP + SP3 partitions, both approx 90Gb in size
[*]One Windows 7 + SP1 which takes up the remainder of the hdd space.
[/LIST]
I’m using the windows 7 boot manager along with EasyBCD to provide the boot time selection and it all seems to work nicely, allowing multiple O/S’s to host software applications which don’t coexist happily together.

I’ve tried to upload an image from this machine to my FOG server (Fog V0.31 on Ubuntu 10.04LTS, using the 3.4 kernel that Astrouga has kindly provided on the forums. I’m using single disk / multiple partition (not resizable) and initially set the host O/S type to Windows 7.

Fog can see all the partitions and uploads the boot partition without issue, however the other three partitions all error out with a ‘segmentation fault’. I’ve tried using XP / Windows (other) and Other as O/S type and I’ve tried the 3.3 and default kernel too but it just won’t play nicely.

I’ve found that Acronis Trueimage can create an image OK to an external USB hdd but i’d rather use FOG.

Any ideas gratefully received. Thanks

Robin

Thank you Falko, I was trying to use a different (per host) kernel last week and was scratching my head not realising that a full path to the new kernel was required… appreciated

Indeed… I’m using FOG 0.31 on my production system currently.

I’ve had a look at this today - in my case it seems to be caused by the hard disk being brand new and having no partition table.

Quite why this should be a problem for FOG is a mystery to me but I have found that if I put the hdd (which is in an easily removable caddy as the pc is a CF19 Toughbook) into a machine then boot the machine from a USB CD-ROM drive with a linux live boot disk in it, I can then run GParted from the live cd and get an error message saying [FONT=Arial]“No partition table found on device /dev/sda”[/FONT]

[FONT=Arial]If I then Use Device -> Create Partition Table to put a basic MS-DOS partition table onto the new hdd I can then take that caddy, put it back into the machine that was showing the problem with FOG deployment and everything is OK.[/FONT]

Hope this helps, YMMV of course !

Edit - I forgot to say that it wasn’t necessary to format the hdd at all, just creating the partition table did the trick for me.

Cheers
Robin

I’m seeing this too occasionally - seems to occur on (what should be) new hdd’s that have just been replaced by the pc manufacturer under extended warranty. I’ve not had a chance to get to the bottom of these yet, just placed them on one side for now, but in my case it’s definitely not BIOS related because I can drop another hdd caddy into the same machine and it will image fine.

I don’t know if this may be relevant or not, but I’ve found that unless the server is connected to a network when the machine is booted the dhcp server didn’t start up. Plugging the network in afterwards provided basic connectivity but you still had no dhcp service until you reboot again. Had me scratching my head for a while.

HTH
Robin

(In Fog 0.31) I usually delete unwanted hosts by first creating a group, adding the unwanted hosts to that group, and then deleting it and it’s associated hosts. HTH

Cheers
Robin

I could well be wrong, but I don’t think it reports to anywhere but the client’s screen - I use this function before imaging on all of my ‘little cherubs’ and as it takes some time (on 160Gb drives anyway…) I found it most convenient to leave 10 units cooking overnight so that they are ready to image the following morning.

I ended up adding a line to one of the config files - sorry, can’t remember which one but it involved editing what is sent to the client at boot time - so that at the end of the disk sector scan process the client would stop and wait for a key to be pressed. I find that works for me. The information you need to acheive this is all in the wiki.

I’d really love to be able to chain commands so that imaging would automatically take place assuming the drive passed the sector test with no errors. That would be cool

Cheers
Robin

Birmingham UK

HP Microserver N40L running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with a pair of 1Tb hdd’s in raid1 for image storage. Isolated network running into a cheap Netgear Gbe switch to unicast to 10 machines at a time.

I look after around 3000 x Panasonic Toughbooks which have a hard life out with Field based workers so the HDD sector scan function comes in very handy.

Cheers
Robin