OK, Can it be changed to use the fog client again? I will also need the Active Directory Join part of that as well. Changing early might be nice but seems like it’s building a feature that FOG already has, unless there will be some other way to join AD in FOG and do all of the other nice features in the client.
If you want access I can PM you the details you need.
Just in the middle of a test run… Storage set to max clients 1 but now 6 are running simultaneously. down to 62MB/M on one VM 
Client hasn’t changed a hostname yet either.
I’ve tried manually running the client, increasing ram on the client PC, manually restarting the service. nothing working at all.
Will leave the test to complete and check hostnames after they’ve sat for a while… see if any of them do anything.
The only problem could occur if certain languages have differences and you want a ‘perfect’ translation.
Having ‘Group’ next to ‘Updated’ may work in one situation but not another. One language may need Updated before group or something else. But the question is… is having translations that may be slightly interesting, but understandable ‘Good Enough’?
Has there been any discussion with chuck about a freeze for a release? Adding in translatability is a big job re-writing basically every file to include variables. It’s been 2 Years 5 Months since 0.32 was released and it would be nice to get something stable on the site so that more people can benefit from fog.
Turning all the text into variables loaded from a file is probably the easiest way to do the translation.
The language setting determines the file it reads and as long as the variables correspond it should work.
as long as a translation is available it’s easy to add… and you may get things done slightly faster/with less processing power if the same variable is used multiple times.
Do you think the pxe menu will be as easy to translate?
Having an option where the pxe image displays but doesn’t display unless you push a certain set of keys would be useful as well.
Sometimes people see the custom logo and start pushing buttons and then wonder why their PC doesn’t boot. No matter how many times you tell them to let the PC boot up they will bash things anyway…
Well, Looks like it’s successfully deployed to a 25gb HDD as well.
What do you want me to check on the MBR RE your concerns?
Anyone else replicated this behaviour?
going to start some tests using the fog client etc soon and may even get around to making a snapin to expand the drive after deployment.
One slightly annoying thing (for me) is that when you set the storage server to Max Clients 1 (which I am doing to try and increase speed on my storage) it still ends up deploying 2 at once sometimes… Yes I know it seems strange, but with a single disk if I do too many it slows down to double digits per minute and I would rather not be waiting a whole day for a test run to complete.
Just in the middle of a test run with 0.33b r1050
I’ve got 12 test VMs and an Exemplar, one of the VMs has a smaller HDD than the exemplar, two that have bigger HDDs, the rest are identical to the exemplar.
I am deploying a Multi Partition image (non resizable) from the exemplar to all 12 VMs unicast.
I was expecting 1 failure… but the VM I was expecting to fail imaged correctly.
my windows 7 is installed on a single partition (no 100mb one) that is about 2/3 of the exemplar disk. No sysprep.
So it seems that moving to partclone may yield a way to deploy images to smaller hardware by setting the image to use less of the HDD and then expand later. The difference in my system is only 1gb (31GB, 32GB, 33GB disks) so may need to see if this works with even smaller disks as my partition is only 19.43GB.
I sysprep at the school where I work. not usually on my test systems.
Just setting up a new set of tests at the moment.
Will try one set without sysprep and one set with.
Might even create a few more VMs to test your new improvements with the SCSI drives in VMware 
Currently the system I run at my school involves a Multi Partition image, created with the smallest drive we use. The only disadvantage is the larger systems don’t use all their HDD space. Easily solvable with Diskpart…
I’ve tried Resizable images once or twice on tests at work and it always seems to end up destroying the operating system and any system deployed from the image doesn’t boot.
Luckily we don’t have anywhere near 80gb of applications so we’re fine with that size image. (although it was annoying when a slightly different 80gb drive in one of our machines didn’t work with our 80gb image…)
I’ve been thinking about resizable images… Since I’ve been having trouble getting them to work. (I have not yet tried the latest 0.33b yet, but aiming to do so very soon)
If Partclone could deploy a partition that is relatively small… only just bigger than the OS and installed apps. and then use a snap in to extend the drive via Diskpart within windows.
the only issue I;ve had so far is that if you start with a certain size HDD and try to deploy to a smaller HDD, even with a partition that is smaller than the new HDD, it will fail. (doing more tests at the moment, but disk IO is limited on my test suite.)
Tom,
Since 0.33b is getting more stable and getting more features… have you planned a feature freeze or time to work on just stability so that there could be a release soon?
It was downloaded yesterday, i’ll try and go into it later and find the revision number.
Usually when i purchase new desktops/laptops the MAC is written on the side of the box so i can pre-stage the computers in FOG. Then when putting them together they only need a BIOS password setting and changing to PXE boot and they sort themselves out.
Usually once we have put in a load i’ll set a hardware inventory job for later so we can have more basic info in fog. (I have a program that does a more complex inventory)
If i were you… I wouldn’t bother with the FOGImageReplicator. Now that i know i have a working deploy i am going to test out the storage server and try using other methods of replication. Allowing it to be done in a custom manner will probably suit those running more complex setups with storage nodes. If they have a lot of them, Many to Many replication may suit better. They could configure something as simple or as complex as they needed.
It’s good that compression is enabled by default… most PCs are a lot more capable than the single core VMs i’m testing on and it shrank my 12gb image to 5gb.
For the logs thing… when partclone was giving the error, it was saying where it stored the error. but i couldn’t get to a command line to look at the log file. maybe since fog has FTP you could add a script to copy the logs directory after an error to the server’s images directory?
The VMs i were using had 25gb HDDs and 512mb RAM. (i know low power, but i only have 2 8GB hosts to play with at home)
I was impressed with FOG running nicely on 512 and even 386mb RAM in debian without using too much swap.
I now have access to a 72GB RAM Test server online, so i’m planning some bigger tests and VPN tests. (Uploading ISOs has taken quite a while but i should be able to do some beefy tests over the Christmas period.)
The GUI button error just seems to be in the debian browser… works fine in IE. (Image Attached)
The Image thing over the inventory - When fog loads it runs through what it’s doing, such as the contents of the inventory and that it is sending the inventory to the server. If a static image could be put in front of that so the user wasn’t ‘confused’ by the strange things on their PC it might make things a bit better. Also people could customize it to their company logo and their employees would know something is supposed to be happening. A progress bar would just mean they could have some indication that something was getting done.
[url=“/_imported_xf_attachments/0/454_GUIButtonError.png?:”]GUIButtonError.png[/url]
Just doing some tests and I’ve found the following: (Latest Debian 64 bit, Test VMs 512mb RAM with Single/Dual vCPUs)
Great Improvements so far and nice to see that Tom is still going strong. Hopefully we can get all the tiny bugs fixed and we could have the next release of FOG
Some suggestions:
On the Hardware inventory it displays what the host is doing… would it be possible to display an image and have a progress bar? (Some users like to try and do strange things like unplug PCs when they see them doing something they don’t know)
Compression settings in the GUI or in the installer?
Bandwidth graph shows both send a receive instead of picking one?
Partclone displays Block xxx of xxx… could it display progress in MB/GB?
Could logs be sent to the server?
I use FOG in my school, it’s saved us many hours and has been running almost perfectly since I installed it. (Some new laptops are a pain)
If you have Active Directory already you can make fog join the machines to that domain.
If you don’t have Active Directory (Some Primary Schools don’t…) then just make sure everything is setup how it needs to be before deploying.
You’ll need to control your DHCP to add the PXE boot options
Also make sure you don’t set too many slots on your server, things slow down to a crawl if your server can’t keep up with the data it is sending.
If your not that experienced with servers/Linux then it might be wise to get someone in who knows how school IT systems work and can do things for you. if you do something wrong with fog you could end up doing a lot of hours fixing things with images and end up with people who can’t use computers for a while.
Torrent is one method I was suggesting… If the replication has an option to turn off so you can implement your own then those of us willing to build what works best will have an advantage.
What method would be best in your environment?
well… if the user wanted to use bittorrent sync an easy way to avoid hassle would be to have a way of just turning off the current replication system. As long as the permissions will be correct in the folder then the images should just sync across.
The user would have to generate their own key and tell bittorrent sync where to sync the images.
I suppose the biggest advantage would be many to many replication. I would have to check if bittorrent sync can take parts of files from different hosts but at a minimum if you had 10 images and were putting in your 11th host… you could get away with transferring one image from each of the others. which could save you a ton of time if your doing things over a WAN.
Is there currently a way to easily disable replication and i’ll throw a couple of VMs on 0.33b and see if I can make it do something.
Would it be possible to run the synchronization between the master node and the storage with Bittorrent Sync?
If you are doing deployment with multiple storage nodes, the files would be able to come from all other nodes and allow for faster syncing with the master. Additionally, if you were implementing a multi site setup, you could have a copy on an external HDD on a laptop that travels with you to the other site and provide a fast source for the replication on that site.
Does your wake button work for groups as well as hosts
Being able to boot up an entire lab for imaging all at once would save you even more time.
Fog distro would be really nice… to be able to quickly spawn a storage node without all the trouble of WGET and APT etc…
Also to be able to show up with an ISO or disk and quickly have a working server would be nice.
But… wouldn’t having an APT based install (and equivalent for other types of Linux) be less work?
Additionally, if you use Debian/Ubuntu, someone will probably moan that you didn’t use CentOS or OpenSUSE, and if you use one of those someone will probably moan that you didn’t use Ubuntu/Debain…
If you have a sysprep your using for tests, could you post it? I’m in the process of putting one together… one of the new places i’m working with need to sysprep… and unfortunately they don’t currently have an unattend.xml
Being able to walk around your site, and have your ‘device of choice’ available to quickly perform tasks could be useful.
I wouldn’t want an openly accessible fog server as we would then have to deal with licensing for Microsoft… Someone uploading the image could be putting their volume license keys or their retail keys out there… additionally, would Microsoft let us store a windows image on a public server?
Also, since an image can easily be 30gb or even hundreds of GB, having fog on the internet would mean that people would be using more than their ISP’s bandwidth cap or ‘fair use policy’.
An internal app would be nice, just like I have an app that does simple things in active directory, doing common things in FOG could be useful.