What the "Fog" is Fog?

traceyke

My boss sent me a link about a imaging software known as Fog and if we should consider using this to image future PCs here. Have any of you guys heard of this? Any of my fellow "level 1 (borderline level 2) desktop support techs" use this software? From what I'm reading, it seems very powerful, awesome, and practical....yet way too good to be true.

meadIT

Don't use it personally, but one of our customers, a local school district, uses it to re-image all of their lab PCs every summer. They swear by it.

FloOz

At my current job we use sccm to push out our builds. The "fog" looks interesting though

qcomer

traceyke wrote: »

My boss sent me a link about a imaging software known as Fog and if we should consider using this to image future PCs here. Have any of you guys heard of this? Any of my fellow "level 1 (borderline level 2) desktop support techs" use this software? From what I'm reading, it seems very powerful, awesome, and practical....yet way too good to be true.

I've used it...its okay. I used it for a long time here and implemented it in other Districts.

I much prefer Windows WDS and MDT though, which are both free with windows servers.

Everyone

Looks like a rip-off open source version of Symantec Ghost.

+1 to qcomer... WDS and MDT.

the_Grinch

We did some testing with it at the school district I was at because they wouldn't allow us to buy Ghost with the networking capabilities. I liked it, but takes a bit to get it up and running. Ultimately the board ok'd the purchase of Ghost so we didn't end up fully implementing it, but nice to have options!

traceyke

the_Grinch wrote: »

...I liked it, but takes a bit to get it up and running....

By "takes a bit", are you saying that it was difficult to setup and use? If so, then what issues did you run into specifically?

the_Grinch

At the time, it was slightly difficult to setup. That being said, this was a number of years ago and they hadn't automated to the install process to the extent that it is now. I recall there being just initial install issues, not issues as far as the imaging process was concerned.

clarknova

I've implemented it on old hardware at my place of work, we successfully imaged over 1000 desktop machines with it last summer along with ad-hoc reimages all through the year. The desktop support team seem to like it very much indeed, it's being used again this summer but will reimage around 1500 this summer. I've set up a load balancing cluster of servers to cough out the images although I've yet to get multicasting working successfully. Once that's sorted I'll be happier but it's working on a gigabit network and with the load balancing it still images a classroom in around an hour.

If you've got any questions I can help with feel free to drop me a PM or post in this thread.