Booting into FOG and Uploading your first Image

For many of us this will be the first encounter of FOG from a client machine. This article starts with explaining how to boot into FOG and register a host, and then moves on to how to create an image object. Finally, you'll start the upload of the new image to the FOG server.

Set client to PXE boot in BIOS

First of all make sure you are connected to the network in which your FOG server resides. Then boot up the client computer, and try to have it PXE by pressing F12 (usually). More often then not, this works or at the very least, gets you to a "boot options" menu. With that said, there are cases where PXE needs to be first enabled in the BIOS before you can use it. If that is the case, go into BIOS, this step may be a little different for every computer. In most cases this involves pressing either F2, F10, or DEL. Then, if the option exists, enable PXE/Network booting.

After that you want to change your boot order, so the first boot device is PXE boot. After making those changes, save your changes and restart the client.

Start the client up again and you should see a menu that looks like the image below:

This is the FOG boot menu.

Register the Client with the FOG Server

Now that the client is pxe booting, we can register it with the FOG server. To do so, select "Perform Full Host Registration and Inventory." During this process you will be asked to answer a few questions like the client's hostname etc. After filling out all questions, the client will go through a quick hardware inventory and restart, at which point the client will be registered with the FOG server.

Create an image object

At this point we must log into the web interface for FOG, this can be done on any PC with network access and web browser.

1. Open a browser and navigate to http://[yourserverip]/fog.
2. Login to the server (default username is fog and default password is password).
3. Navigate to the images section which is the icon in the top row that looks like picture.
4. On the left hand menu select New Image.
5. Enter a meaningful Image Name (no special characters)
6. Enter a description if you wish.
7. Under storage group, select default
8. If the image file is not as you would like it, change it now (no spaces or special characters)
9. If you are imaging a single partition Windows machine, select Single Partition
10. Click Add

Associated the image with the host

Now we have an image object, but we need to link that image to the host we wish to upload.

1. Go to the host section by clicking on the monitor in the top menu bar.
2. Click List All Hosts and locate the host you registered with the server.
3. Click the Edit button next to that host.
4. Make sure the Host OS is set correctly
5. Select your image from the Host Image drop down box
6. Click update

Create the Task

1. Still in the host object, click on the Basic Tasks option on the left hand menu.
2. Select Upload
3. Click Upload Image
4. Reboot client and it should pull an image from that computer.