Support for use as FOG Project Server

[freenasfan]

FOG is a free, open source computer cloning solution (think "Symantec Ghost"), which allows computers to be cloned via the network, via either unicast or multicast.

It pulls together several technologies into one comprehensive package which covers DHCP, NFS and TFTP (which together provide PXE services), as well as FTP and http.

See www.fogproject.org. for more information.

[bsdimp]

Corrected version that this enhancement applies to

[jwhitt]

Just to clarify... were you considering integrating the FOG project into Freenas, or using freenas as a storage location for your images?

I could see using freenas as a location for your images, there are two options i believe when you install fog you can set the image location usually /images this could be mounted via a nfs share on your freenas machine to your fog server.

Or FOG has the abbility to create what it calls storage nodes. My thought would be to create a plugin for freenas that creates a storage node of a share on freenas. This would require to see what is involved in creating a storage node on fog and implementing that as a plugin for freenas.

I haven't worked too much with storage nodes on FOG, however i believe there are some benefits to using fog with storage nodes over mounting a share. I will look into this and see what i can come up with.

[freenasfan]

I would prefer integrating FOG into FreeNAS over using it as a storage node, since it would be an all-in-one solution. Having said that, I would settle for using it as a storage node, since it would at least provide me with image versioning via ZFS snapshots

Also, I believe storage nodes are better than a simple NFS mount, as storage nodes in the same group are kept in sync via FTP (I would prefer rsync for obvious reasons, but this is how FOG does it at the moment).

[MenacingM]

++

[V4705]

Second that, its a great idea.

[btaylor]

This is a great idea. I am doing the same thing! Anything to keep me further away from windows machines :). Total integration is always a goal. Although I think it would be very difficult since Fog is primarily PHP and FreeNas? is Django Python. I think the main idea of storage nodes in Fog is to utilize more hosts with FTP or NFS to multicast mass clients. Overall I don't see a whole lot of changing the current infrastructure there. For a complete integration I assume to make this happen, unfortunately would be to scrap the Fog idea and write a new service view. This view could be created utilizing more Python friendly tools like Cobbler. Also could reuse much of the existing code. Stuff like this would be good to have a plugin feature for FreeNas? which could be community driven. More specifically, Django apps that can be integrated with an API? I'm new if I missed some obvious docs. I woulden't want to take the devs away from crucial issues. One more thing, as good as it may sound for all this integration. Having the nas and imager seperate allows me to use the imaging server as a virtual machine host, making it easier to update the master image (virtual to metal). I'm sure that most of the popular hypervisors run on FreeBSD, but wow what a system that would be! Yes, Multiple disconnected systems are a pain, but there is some truth to that age old Unix philosopy sometimes, do one thing and do it well.

Bryan

[gcooper]

FOG is a complete Linux software distribution with a pretty PHP GUI on top to integrate everything together. It would be better to rewrite the individual components from scratch in 8.1, or port over the PHP bits if you really desire. I don't recommend porting FOG though because a) it contains Linux specific code, and b) it uses Java (at least superficially.. I didn't look to see if it used.

You're better off creating plugins for dhcp, named, etc as most of this stuff is either already included in FreeBSD or can be installed with minimal headache.