Posts made by Steve Ropiak

Is it Windows 7? Did you run sysprep prior to imaging? Which sysprep options did you use?

You are welcome. I’m happy to help. Good luck with Fog. It’s a great solution.

I guess I am still a bit confused. When I upload an image I create the task in Fog for that host, then PXE boot the computer to load the Fog client and execute the upload task. On our desktops (HP) I just use the F9 key at boot to select PXE as the boot method. At the end of the upload process the desktop shuts down.

Once I have the image uploaded to Fog, I create a deployment task for the destination hosts and set them to PXE boot (using F9) so that the Fog client loads and the image is deployed. After the image is deployed, the computers reboot.

If you don’t PXE boot the computer to Fog, what method are you using to upload the image?

Let me see if i understand correctly, you started an upload, the client rebooted, now the client just keeps rebooting. Is it still trying to load the PXE boot when it boots or is it trying to boot from the local disk?

I think the temp folder is dev in /images. Try looking in thete. Refer to this for some tftp troubleshooting [url]http://fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Unable_to_connect_to_TFTP[/url]

OK, so based on my limited knowledge here is what I think is happening: The imaging of the client completes to the temp area, but the tftp from the temp area to /images is failing. I know there are lots of posts and help in the Wiki on that so I’d suggest searching for tftp failures or errors for some troubleshooting ideas.

On my server it is off of the root folder, or /images

Haven’t done any in a while, but I think an upload can take several hours depending on the data. If you look in /images on the fog server, what do you see and how big is it?

Hmm, if the computer has successfully uploaded shouldn’t the next step be deploy? What happens when you try to deploy this image?

When you upload the image, does the Fog client report that it was successful? If it has any issues, you should see messages on the client screen. Fog is good about that. Also, the format of the image is not an ISO. I’m not familiar with the format or type of file it uses, but I know enough that it is not an ISO. What OS are you cloning? When you created the image definition, what type did you pick? When we clone our Windows 7 machines, we choose Multiple Partitions, all disks, not resizeable to insure it grabs that annoying little 100 MB partition Windows 7 likes to create. There are other ways to clone Windows 7, but this has worked well for us…

We deployed about 200 Windows 7 desktops last summer with Fog and I’ll share what we did:

Build one machine as master
Run sysprep /oobe /generalize
Fog pulls an image from the master to the Fog server
We use Multicast to send images out to the other computers.

When the computers boot, they run the mini setup, ask for computer name, etc.

One thing is we use KMS licensing so individual computers do not have a license key. Depending on how you license, there may be additional stuff you need to do.

i am not saying this is the only way, but this worked well for us.

You can deploy the image to as many computers as you choose. Whether or not you can use the same key for all the computers is determined by the type of Microsoft licensing you have.

Fog is not a VDI solution, it is an image deployment solution. The way I use it is I build a master for our student labs, run sysprep to generalize and shrink wrap the build, then use Fog to deploy it to the 200 computers on campus. It is similar to Clonezilla or Symantec Ghost.

We have Fog 0.30 running on Centos but would like to move to a newer release so I’m anxious to see your work. Thanks for taking a bullet for us.

Interesting concept. I’ve never heard of anyone doing this. My gut tells me it’s not possible but maybe someone has a solution for this. How about putting everything on a flash drive that is made bootable?

OK, thanks for clearing that up. I was confusing 0.32 with 0.33

I checked the release note and didn’t see anything that interested me. Having worked in a corporate environment since the early 90’s i am still torn between the desire to keep current vs. not messing with something that is working as well as Fog 0.30 is for us. Hmm . . Fog 0.32 is still in Beta? I thought the web site said it’s released and stable. If it’s still in Beta, I will be patient and wait. Thanks for your suggestion and imput.

We’re running 0.30 on Red Hat and loving every minute of it. (A tip of the hat to all the Fog Developers who put in countless hours to make our lives easier.) I am wonder if there is any substantial improvements in performance or features that make it worth the time to upgrade? Thanks to all who reply,

I did get that error and, on a whim, checked permissions on the /images folder. As it turns out, only root had write permissions there. Once I corrected the permissions, all is well. Thanks for the post. Everyone here is great.

Just installed a new san and changed the mount point (is this the correct term?) of the /images folder to the SAN and moved the contents. I did find the article on moving the /images folder and created the .mntcheck file in both /images and /images/dev. Deploying an existing image works great, but when I upload it seems to get to the dev folder but never gets FTP’d to it’s final resting place. Did I miss something? Thanks to all who replied.