by The Tightwad
Episode 4 – Shining the Light on FOG
6:27 pm in Show Notes by The Tightwad
Synopsis:
In this episode Mark and Shawn are joined by Chuck Syperski and Jian Zhang to discuss FOG, a free and open source hard drive imaging and remote administration suite. Visit our Podcast page to give it a listen and be sure to come back here and leave some feedback in the comments.
Links:
InstallRite – An application packaging utility
TIPS:
Tech Tip of the Week – WinAudit
Teacher Tip of the Week – LiveMocha.com
I've been using FOG since February this year with 0.28 at a primary school here in the south-west of Western Australia.
The server i am using isn't the beefiest of computers (celeron 2.8GHz w/ 512MB RAM), but i managed to do up an image of one of the libraries new 30 computers, get AD integration set up, and deploy that image out to all 30 computers (initially doing the unicast deployment and finding it would take about 9hrs or so).
Then, the other day i decided to try out 'multicast' and managed to deploy a newly created image onto those machines in less than 10mins.
Only thing that gets a bit repetitious with FOG now is that i have to remove all user profiles from the machine, run defrag, remove it from the AD, and then when Windows says it needs to reboot because of that change, the FOG task just fires up and uploads the image.
Will be adding an extra 32 computers to the FOG system soon (when the new building is built), have to say that FOG has completely removed the necessity to take the computer away, re-install windows (plus software), 2 hrs later, put computer back in place.
I also use Group Policy to deploy my software…
just linked to your site today…
keep up the good work, and thank you for all you have done so far
Just finished hearing the podcast.
Great to hear about all of the new additions to version 0.29.
Also big man love from Israel as well
Because I am using FOG as the base for my PXE Utilities, I have written a subset of the installation guide on my wiki, and also thats why I heavily link back to the FOG site.
http://hotfortech.wikispaces.com/how+to+setup+Aviad's+PXE+server+%26+extensions
And one last thing, Mark & Chuck, you guys should definitely put a PayPal button on your site… I know that I’d use it.
We bought ghost and never got it to work over the network. two days with fog and it was working a treat. just did my first batch of Windows 7 images today and although the new sysprep is a pain to learn, fog was a champion.
this is a classic example of why Open Source software is just so much better.
to the developers…thank you!
To the guys behind tightwad, like the shows, will be tuning back in next week.
We are using LANDesk currently, but are looking at options. FOG ticks all the boxes for remote deployment, but what are you all using for remote management?
@Shane – Could you post some details up on sysprep and fog for Windows 7? We've had great success using it with WinXP here but both admins who knew sysprep have left so there's a gap in knowledge. It would be great if you could share your experiences, there doesn't even seem to be anything up on the FOG wiki about Win 7 yet.
Thanks,
John
Hi John
I will get some notes together shortly as I still have a few issues to work out with the sysprep. I am not having any joy with the hostname change and domain join yet.
What do you need your sysprep to do? I am not doing any driver installation or anything at this point as I have a hardware specific image for each client type.
You will find my contact details on my website (hint: click where it says Shane above my post) if you want to email. Would be nice to help out a fellow irishman!! I think I had a mate go to Griffith!
@John this is the guide I followed for Sysprep http://blog.brianleejackson.com/sysprep-a-windows-7-machine-%E2%80%93-start-to-finish-v2
Hey guys. This Summer will be my first time dealing with the 7 machines as well. I only have a few, and will likely get to those last. I'll come back and post any "aha" moments, but looks like you may have already figured it out. Thanks for that link Shane!
-Shawn (shawn@thetightwadtech.com)
Shane, how's it going? Small world as always eh? We're in the middle of testing various candidate machines for some lab updates this summer with Win7 Enterprise 32 & 64bit. So far no problems with sysprep (bar the 3 runs restriction). We've uploaded a few images and deployed them for testing but haven't tried the hostname changer and AD integration, we'll have to soon cause if that doesn't work we'll have a real problem. If you find out anything in the mean time let me know. Likewise I'll post back here if we do.
John