Colorado State University

So, some of you may have been aware that I was in the market for a new computer imaging and cloning solution for our computer labs, teaching wet laboratories, and special general purpose rooms.  Overall I have just over 100 computers that need image management on a fairly routine basis.

How I was doing it: I was using a VERY old version of Symantec Ghost that was purchased before I started here at CSU – so in short, I was probably not using them 100% legally, AND it was a pain in the butt getting newer network cards to work and the imaging process was so crazy slow I needed relief.

The Options: Symantec products are always an option, but I am frugal, and really like using FOSS to save us some money – so I chose a couple of the popular ones and began to compare.  The two were Clonezilla (http://clonezilla.org) and FOG (http://www.fogproject.org).  First off, Clonezilla and FOG both have great reviews and very loyal followers – however, I needed to look at what was going to work best in my environment, and then apply the standard subjectivity – like how pretty it looks.

In short, I chose FOG due to the fact that it allows followup imaging tasks (software installations) and printer installations, uses a windows service to allow client-server communication to schedule tasks, and images through PXE boot so no boot media needed!  Oh, and FOG looks much nicer and is rather intuitive when compared the the occasionally confusing Clonezilla.  Yes, I know there are other commercial products out there – but this one is FREE!

My Experiences: I waited until May 25th to give this a try so that I could also play with the new Fedora 13 (very nice by the way).  Once I had the fresh OS installed – and the newest FOG package installed (.29 at this time) I was ready to get started.  First off, the installation was a breeze – the questions you needed to answer were in plain language, and not overly needy – I only strayed from the default choices as I wanted to use our existing DHCP server instead of having the FOG installer set up one for me.

After The Installation: After the installer completed, I was ready to go, and this pretty much meant I was done working at the FOG server console.  So, I settled back in front of my main office workstation, and brought up the web management front end – and apart from from some very minor customizations required on the server end, I will use this exclusively for the remainder of my testing!  The first thing I did was to create a test image and configure a test client to work with FOG – setting up the image and client in the management web front end was a breeze as long as you have the client’s hostname, IP and MAC address.  Having this client work with FOG really only requires two items.  One, I needed to install the FOG windows service and configure it properly (IP of the FOG server for the most part).  Once this was set, I needed to change the boot order within BIOS to have the network card with PXE attempt the first boot.  All set!

On my fist attempt I ran into some NSF routing errors.  Looking into these messages on the FOG support forums and FOG User Guide (great resources for most gotchas) I discovered that a slew of firewall ports needed opening as well as the deactivation of SELinux.  A quick restart of the server and we were creating an image successfully!

Image deployment was also a breeze – and I played around with scheduling through the web interface which also worked great – 5 minutes after setting the task as ‘forced’ the machine automatically restarted, booted via PXE, and was imaging!

One of the great things the Windows Service on the client side can handle is that automatic host name changing and Active Directory binding.  This took some hunting and I found a solution here (Link Dead): https://sourceforge.net/projects/freeghost/forums/forum/716419/topic/3469402

I also got a ‘Snapin’ working properly for adding registry entries (.reg file) so that a domain user automatically logs in once on boot!  Information on that here (Link Dead): https://sourceforge.net/projects/freeghost/forums/forum/716418/topic/3681306

Aren’t those support forums great!?  All in all I have the few things I needed to accomplish and play with more of the ‘bonus’ items soon.  I hope you take a look at FOG for your next deployment software change – it works and looks great!