Sorry Mac people – this post isn’t for you!
Ah yes, that new, shiny, and slick OS by Microsoft. They said:
More happy is coming!
And now it is here, and it was your idea. I mean, look how you can snap two windows side by side! And isn’t it great how you can watch zombies and sharks cuddle on TV while playing video games?
Who doesn’t want that?
Pipe down Mac people, I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to the rest of us who may have to work at a church where we have 20 workstations with Vista on them.
But do you have a method of deployment to image machines?
Deployment Method?
I hope by now most people are using some sort of deployment method to image machines. This means those restore disks and backup partitions most rely on when they buy a new computer are completely useless, well, you can give them to that one guy who likes to hang the CD’s on the wall of his cubical.
When a network begins to grow, the need to deploy an OS to a computer remotely becomes pertinent. This goes for any OS, including OSX and Linux. As usual, all the cool software, like Symantec’s Ghost and Microsoft’s System Center Configuration Manager cost mega-gabillionz (that is a million followed by a gabillion zeros) to use, install, and maintain.
This is another reason why you should embrace the Open Source Community!
Enter FOG!
FOG (Free and Open Ghost) is deployment software with zero cost attached to it (hence the “free” part). The FOG project started as a solution for educators who had little money to spend on computer cloning / image deployment. Of course, they do not stop at just image deployment, FOG has the ability to do the following:
- Memory testing
- Virus scanning
- Disk Wiping
- File recovery
- Printer deployment
- Deploy XP, Vista, and Seven
The best part for me? FOG has a web interface allowing you to start your imaged from anywhere you need to (they support iPod Touch and iPhone browsers).
In order to run FOG, you will need a decent processor and RAM (while they have no real recommendation, I would throw at least 2gb at it) and decent hard drive space. Each image you make will probably be about 5gb. FOG runs on Linux, so be sure to download the latest Debian or Ubuntu as well.
If you check out their wiki, you can get step-by-step installation instructions along with video tutorial.
[I have never watched any of the tutorial videos. I cannot tell you the quality or usability of them. This may be a testament to how good the documentation is, however. It was so good, I did not even need the video.]
The project has been extremely well documented and is easy to follow, even if you have never used Linux before.
FOG has impressed me from top to bottom. It is well put together and incredibly easy to use. Of course, you cannot beat the price either.
Tim Owens says
Now I’m tempted to go and change my entire imaging routine to see if FOG would make life better. My gut keeps telling me that usually I end up sorely dissapointed when I try to pit FOSS projects against commercial software, but my copy of Ghost is aging and it’s summer and I’m bored…
Don Dudley says
It’s not too bad, just try it on a lab of about three computers first, or a couple of VM’s.
Kevin says
We’ve been testing this since this post, it’s awesome.