There’s nothing that fog does that powershell remoting can’t do better when you consider a windows 7+s2008 with winRM installed at a minimum environment. Bonus is security is already done for that. Not having a client application in my opinion is a big win, makes new deployments that bit more friendlier. Using powershell should really be sysadmin 101 and is looking to go more that way every day.

Looking at the wikis for nfs, samba and ftp it strikes me that the problem we have with NFS is that we aren’t using enough of it. Theres all kinds of authentication and multi server load balancing and redundancy etc. we aren’t using. There’s a heck of a lot being added to SMB in the windows world with s2012 and 12r2 is there anything there to look into? Booting multiple machines off a single shared vhdx image file I think is pretty new for 2012 R2.

Please stop quoting entire posts that’s not how forums work.

The way I see it FOG does like 3 or 4 things that are completely separate but through no ones fault are so tightly coupled you can’t change anything. I mean fog uses 2 different FTP servers for gods sake.

We need;
[LIST]
[]A server to hand out images.
[LIST]
[]The pxe boot images to service tasks like register or pull down the…
[]Client images
[/LIST]
[]A Boot image
[LIST]
[]Just need to be absolutely tiny
[]Runs on any hardware we can throw it at
[/LIST]
[]Management details
[LIST]
[]key/value store of hostname/MAC address’ for tasks to hook onto
[*]handle multiple fog sites if need be
[/LIST]
[/LIST]
I don’t see why any of those all have to be in one project. FOG should literally just be the easiest way to boot an image across a number of computers to do a task. Pretty much everything else would be better served by making another image and use fog to boot that i.e. file recovery. But that’s up to the user to add the boot image. First thing I do to fog is modify the PXE menu to boot the Ultimate Boot CD and ubuntu.
I’m in the process of trying to write just the features I want with nodejs but I’m not putting in much effort as I’ve no idea how to go about making the linux images boot and write/capture my images made with MDT. If I could choose how the good devs of this project use their time I’d spend it on a flawless boot image. Everything else could be a browser application that talks to a fog-like service which in my opinion the community is better developing/iterating on than using the core devs time.
Now I’m going back to trying to compile a kernel to run on my AMD a8-6500/MSI new build. This post may sound critical but I do think you guys are awesome. If you don’t have a lot of time to work with then above is my suggestion on the least you could possibly do for the most benefit.

I’d like to be able to have fog specifically image 1 partition alone leaving other intact.

[B]I’m asking for:[/B]
Classroom PC, 500GB HDD
50 GB windows system
450GB partition I want fog to leave alone. Don’t format it, but don’t capture it too.

[B]Possible Method:[/B]
Perhaps you could do this with a step between sysprep the image and uploading it. Boot the pxe menu, use a register like tool but to add the partition table to fogs database where I can then choose that image type action on a specific partition. eg, Single Partition (NTFS ONLY, [U]Not [/U]re-sizable) for disk 1 partition 1, No Action for disk 1 partition 2, Tick maintain partition table.

[B]Why on earth?:[/B]
I wanted to investigate some other storage methods we need a large about of space for but not much availability. Archives perhaps. I wonder if I could make a 450GB trueCrypt partition on say, 90 machines and tie them all together as a storage cluster with NFS or something similar. That’s 40.5TB total I could divvy up for redundancy and use for archive storage. But I can’t if when a machine goes down fog will whack the other partition on image.

Searching for a specific snapin, then going back to listing all snapins will now show all the snapins. I don’t know what that problem was about…

[QUOTE]To get the snap-ins to work, you either have to image a machine that has snap-ins associated with it, or deploy snap-ins using the advanced tasks menu available through the host details page or through the tasks page.[/QUOTE]

I suspect this was the step I’m missing.

You’ll have to forgive my late reply I’ve not been in work since the post and now the domain is down so doing much like this is quite cobbled together.

Do the snapins add anything to the log files to say if they’re having problems and what they might be or is the only entry along the lines of “snapin completed”. Will the log tell me if it didn’t have enough privilegesto run the snapin for example.

How might I test the connection to make sure fogService is checking in properly.

finally, I see a snapin I made a long time ago I’ve put the full path to run it; “C:\Windows\System32\msiexec.exe” to run an MSI. Does it have to be a full path or could I just have put msiexec.exe.

Likewise do I need the exe file or will what works in win key + R run too. eg. “c:\windows\system32\regedt32.exe” changes to just “regedit”

fog 0.32 hosted on a linux mint server that’s not tha tup to date.

I can create snapin and assign them to machines, creating them fog knows if I’ve uploaded that file before or not however.

The snapin page does not show any at all, only the various drop down boxes to add snapins to machines list them.

My clients with snapins applied, in their log file the SnapinClient finds no tasks for its MAC.

Any suggestions?

This particular snapin is a reg file if that matters.

And to pass out a warning to those delving into sysprep for the first time.

In windows 7, if you don’t do your unattend file correctly the windows setup will always error are the same point it looks for the file and therefore loop the setup.

As far as I’ve figured whenever I’ve done this I have to start the image again from a fresh windows install. It doesn’t just give me the options to fill out manually.

Test it on a VM, use snapshots.

Further point, IF there is a dump of the old forums host it up somewhere or torrent it. It might be a fun weekend project to practice regular expressions for someone.

A lot of us in educational establishments have things like google cache and other proxies blocked for good reason. it’s not a good alternative.

The 2 big problems are that Nearly every link from google now goes to a blackhole where a sourceforge thread used to be or it goes to the front page of the wiki with the changlelog on it which is completely useless.

I added these forums to the getting in touch wiki.