morganw

I've done a personal laptop (XP) and a standalone school laptop (W7) using system restore and then two scans with MSSE. How does this stuff actually install, can you acquire it even when running under a non-privileged account?

On Xenserver I had to install the grub legacy package after an upgrade to Squeeze to get it to boot. I guess you are running it on Xen though so maybe there is a different workaround but I imagine it's the same backend stuff trying to locate and execute the bootloader. Our FOG system is still on debian lenny for the time being though.

I think they would make more of an impact by using the storage backend to provide a multi-user aware dropbox style client, so everyone can sync there files wherever they may be and then if they want to collaborate - do the conversion into an actual google doc and share it without a specific plugin. If it had a 30 day bin and file versioning then everyone's life would get a little easier. Not that I think this Cloud Connect plug-in is a bad idea, but in reality I think collaborative document editing wouldn't be used to it's full potential in most environments.

I think the installer is only tested on ubuntu and fedora so either of those would seem a logical choice. I use debian and haven't had any issues.

It's out now. Version 0.30 ------------ Release date: Feb 23th, 2011 *Rebuilt init image (ALL Thanks to Aaron Bergz!!!!) details below **Converted to Busy Box **Added detection for number of CPUs **Parallel upload image compression **Added drive write cache check. *Update memtest from 4.0 to 4.2 *Updated kernel to version 2.6.37 (core) *Added kernel branch - core *Added additional search fields to the host search from the inventory table *Updated chntpass support to scan partitions looking for sam file

Looks like the references to the free version have gone from the site, if you download the trial though you might be able to register it for free use. It was just a basic version that had a 2TB storage limit and also a I think it had a limit on the number of concurrent connections. StarWind High Availability SAN Software for iSCSI Storage High Availability

You could use the free version of the Starwind iSCSI target to test out the initiator side, or I've done it with the iSCSI target on Debian, the package is called "iscsitarget".

...and then use port forwarding on the router for whatever service you want to expose.

I just signed up for a free account with dyndns.com, put the login details in my wireless router / modem, then just access it with a dyndns hostname. The IP address will change but the hostname will always work.

So does an RDP 7.1 session compare favorably to a Citrix ICA session in terms of multimedia performance?

I think the problem is that when using Windows 7 the service isn't associated with the desktop session that you are logged in with. Apparently if you use snap-ins you can see evidence of it trying to install / notify in a new desktop session. I'm pretty sure that .30 is meant to address this.

The client service was only written to run on xp, I believe the next release of FOG is meant to have the service tweaked to work better with Windows 7.

Probably not what you want to hear but, have you looked at backuppc instead? The documentation is a lot more straightforward and it has file level deduplication and other features which are useful in enterprise. I was really impressed with it and will probably replace our current backup system with it when I've got some spare hardware.

Is there any information anywhere on a thin version of Windows 7?

I hope the GPU isn't required to make it go, I'm not looking for 3D acceleration or a full 'this is your personal Windows 7 VM' style VDI system, just decent multimedia acceleration of everything that is more cost effective than XenApp.

Does anyone know if RemoteFX is suitable for use as a general multimedia accelerator for Remote Desktop sessions? After reading about it I thought it was but then I've also read about Citrix integrating it into their HDX system, wouldn't that be overlapping similar technologies? Or is RemoteFX meant to be more focused on 3D acceleration? At the moment we've dipped a toe into thin clients with 16 XenApp licenses, I'm wandering whether it's worth trying a similar kind of deployment with RemoteFX instead. I can't see anywhere that says RemoteFX costs anything extra on top of the standard Remote Desktop CALs so it would work out a lot cheaper if it can handle the usual flash websites. Anyone else considering something like this?

Yes, you can pick it up from http://yourfogservername/fog/client When you install it you can either set it to reference your FOG server by name, or make a DNS alias for it called FOGSERVER. The service requires .Net framework 2.0 so that will have to be in the image as well. Potentially you could install it after the after the mini-setup stage using group policy or a script but you would need to also script a reboot or service restart so that it will do the rename / domain join unattended.

We've got 16 thin client laptops that connect to a terminal server running XenApp. Unless you run everything as a thin client you will actually increase you management overhead as you'll have to deploy software in the traditional way, and then duplicate the effort onto the thin client servers. We've also found that our network infrastructure will operate a fat client with no issues (bursty traffic) but will struggle to run the Citrix ICA session (constant data stream needed) without drop outs. If you've got the infrastructure, your applications will work with it (and people know to ask before buying new software), and it's designed with ease of managment in mind, then it does seem the obvious way to go though. If you go for the full blown VDI stuff then application compatibility isn't such an issue but requires much more investment in backend hardware.

You need to install the FOG service into your image. You need to do this as the last thing before you run sysprep as on the next boot the service will attempt to rename the workstation, then reboot, then try to join the domain (if you have this configured for the host in FOG). The service runs independently from the imaging process. Most of the issues you will encounter with a domain join are covered here.

The one thing that you will notice is that different companies will push whatever is in their interest to sell you, not what you require. I think this is why few companies will take you down the Hyper-V route, they won't get much out of it other than a possible support contract. Hyper-V licensing for schools is cheap, bordering on free if you can support it yourself as a lot of people are already licensed for it. I've also had conflicting advice regarding Fibre Channel and iSCSI SANs and also hypervisor selection. In fact in a recent phone call I had one reseller tell me that hypervisor X was only suitable for small scale deployments, he had never heard of anyone using it on a large scale, and I should obviously be looking to move to hypervisor Y (which he was more than happy to provide a quote for). Anyway we had a system fitted with paid support, and had it degenerate into an unstable mess after an upgrade. Our entire system was vistualised, an update seemed to introduced a problem, there was no rollback option. We hadn't done anything wrong, there was no hardware fault, there was no configuration issue, it just didn't work and the problem couldn't be traced. For financial and setup reasons we had moved everything in one go onto this system, in the process going from 6 physical servers to about 14 virtual ones. The critical issue was that we now had nowhere to go, half of our old servers wouldn't run the hypervisor, the ones that did only had about 4GB of RAM but we now needed at least 5 times that for all of the VMs, and our 2TB of data was now consolidated into one VM that wouldn't fit anyway but on a SAN that didn't work properly. Regardless of what you do yourself or what you purchase, make sure that you have an exit strategy for your services if you system starts to fail. High availability on one system doesn't count, we had that, it does nothing when the complete system is unreliable. Either get support that has well defined service level agreements for service dropouts and data loss (i.e. they turn up with new equipment if your solution doesn't work), or design a solution that has distributed backups and redundancy that cannot be compromised by complete system instability - resellers are quite happy to provide you with systems that do not achieve this.

At the moment i'm using Fog with two syspreded images to image about 20 different modles of PC (and the second image is only for two models), it's mainly the driver management I'm looking to streamline by using MDT. I was under the impression that you couldn't install XP directly from source with MDT2010 (this is how it works in SpecOps Deploy OS and that's just a wrapper for MDT) but I'll give that a try in a minute, thank you for the instructions.

That's an idea, i'll take a look at that as well. Thanks.

The plan was to get a fresh install of XP as a WIM file, deploy that, then use the windows updates feature and application deployment of MDT to get it ready for people to use. It would mean a slow build but I wouldn't be deploying out-of-date images any more. Seem resonable? Or is there a better way?

Thanks. I didn't think it was possible to deploy a 'fresh' Windows XP image. I haven't got anything in the image, I just installed XP from a CD, then captured it straight away. Is there another way that I could deploy XP using MDT2010?

I'm trying to test deploying Windows XP with MDT2010 (booting via WDS). I've captured a syspreped XP image, and imported it as a new OS. Now when deploying it, it is ignoring all of the options that have been set in the sysprep.inf file. Looking at the task sequence for the deployment I'm pressing the button that says edit sysprep.inf (next to the option to edit unattend.txt) and I can see that the relevant bits have already been filled in by the OS import, so for example the license key has been set. During deployment it will prompt me for a licence key, workstation name, workgroup / domain, it just seems to be ignoring the sysprep file. Any ideas?