need a disc image storage program

[dl604]

hey guys,

I do laptop wiping and restoring to factory Images, does anyone know of a program that can act as a server storage of images so many laptops can connect to it over a network to access the images? something that can manage several hundred images.

thanks everyone!

[Peter.Cort]

Try this, fogproject.org. Jayce a member on here has used this a lot and I know he deploys a lot of images using it. I'll direct him to this thread.

[Jayce]

FOG is your ticket. I set it up at my last job who previously had no cloning solution besides a 5,000 dollar super slow hard drive cloner. Since then, FOG has been the standard there for the better part of 3 years. Linux based, open source, free, and rock solid - aka pretty awesome.

The arrangement they have now is 2 technicians run Ubuntu on their laptops for mobile imaging needs in other buildings. Then there's 1 main FOG server at the high school (this environment is a school district) that serves as a file server for all images as well as imaging in the high school.

It's rather easy to set up, but it does require a hint of terminal work to install. If you have a spare box around, particularly with a gigabit NIC port, I'd install Ubuntu and the latest FOG package and run it through some test drives. Just make sure you test deploying/uploading images on a spare machine before you begin to use it on production client gear that could put you in a bind.

Fun fact - From my Dell Latitude E5500 work issued laptop, across 3 years of FOG use I imaged approximately 4,000 machines. This info was based on my imaging export log.

[dl604]

FOG is your ticket. I set it up at my last job who previously had no cloning solution besides a 5,000 dollar super slow hard drive cloner. Since then, FOG has been the standard there for the better part of 3 years. Linux based, open source, free, and rock solid - aka pretty awesome.

The arrangement they have now is 2 technicians run Ubuntu on their laptops for mobile imaging needs in other buildings. Then there's 1 main FOG server at the high school (this environment is a school district) that serves as a file server for all images as well as imaging in the high school.

It's rather easy to set up, but it does require a hint of terminal work to install. If you have a spare box around, particularly with a gigabit NIC port, I'd install Ubuntu and the latest FOG package and run it through some test drives. Just make sure you test deploying/uploading images on a spare machine before you begin to use it on production client gear that could put you in a bind.

Fun fact - From my Dell Latitude E5500 work issued laptop, across 3 years of FOG use I imaged approximately 4,000 machines. This info was based on my imaging export log.

Hi Jayce,

thanks for the repsonse, do you knoe if a program which can catalouge restore cds? and possible access them via a link?
also for clarification the process here at my work is we receive laptops in large quantities( few hunred at a time) and have to:

wipe them
restore them from an image stored on hardrives and using ( acronis) or recovery discs
test

do you think FOG will work with this?will it be able to act as a image server for various models of laptops to access the images? also i have very limited knowledge of linex, will this be an issue?

will fog act as a image storage server so i can just connect to it with a client pc's to restore from those images?
can i easily copy the images to the fog server?

[Jayce]

Well, if you haven't ever used Linux before, reading up on it and checking it out couldn't hurt. You won't be doing too much work in it besides installing it and then installing FOG. After that it's just using the FOG interface via web browser.

I had different image types set up with FOG. After all, what students in a middle school need installed will be vastly different from what students in the elementary school will need to utililze. As a result, I tailored each lab or laptop cart to fit their needs. So you do one install manually on a target system. Afterwards, you upload that image to your FOG server over the network. Then that image is saved. Name it something informative and you'll be good to go. I would always include the OS type, location, and hardware involved. AKA - DellLatitudeE5500SmithLibraryXPPro would be an example.

When it was all said and done, I basically had an image for each lab or laptop cart. Across a district with 7 buildings that's quite a lot of images, but it allowed me to customize the installs for each individual scenario. To deploy, I would just log into the server and go from there. Because the district I worked at when I set up FOG was so spread out, pulling large images across the WAN was difficult to do in a timely manner. That's why I just set up FOG on my laptop to be my mobile imaging server. I also had a 24 port gigabit switch. That way I could just plug in all the systems to the switch, plug my laptop into the switch, and image them on the fly. Imaging on a localized gigabit switch will always give you the best speeds. I was able to image two sets of 15 systems (30 total for an entire lab) in about 30 minutes with XP Pro, Libre Office, Firefox, Chrome, and a series of educational applications.

About the file server thing, that's possible too, but that'll be done in Linux itself. FOG stores the images in /images. When I set up file sharing via Samba, I used a utility known as system-config-samba. I set up my share, gave access to the necessary users, and linked /images to be a network share. That way the folder that FOG uses to store images also doubles as a place for me to pull/push them from as well. The reason I did that is because there were times I didn't have an image on my laptop I needed, but I knew the server had it. I'd end up just copying the image down to my laptop via file sharing services, do something else for a little bit, come back, then use that image I transferred to my laptop to deploy that very image to whatever systems I was working on there on the local LAN with my gigabit switch.

I haven't used Acronis, but I have used Ghost. FOG absolutely wipes the floor. If it wasn't for FOG during our system refresh in 2009 where we got all brand new systems (approximately 1,200 systems) we'd likely still be installing Windows to this day.