Prepare for image capture

[pcnate]

It would be really useful to have a feature to temporarily disable joining to a domain and even remove it from the domain and maybe run a script to uninstall certain applications that don't like being imaged. Then after image capture it would revert, join to domain and deploy snapins that were removed

[Sebastian-Roth]

This can all be done using snapins. I don't see why this should be an added feature to the fog-client. How would you think should we integrate that into the host settings page?!

[pcnate]

This would require adding a snapin then deploying it to "prepare", then removing it from the host because you wouldn't want to deploy all snapins if one removes Avast or some other applications and another removes it from the domain.

Also, snapins don't provide much feedback, and I've had several that just get stuck forever with no feedback as to why. PDQ Deploy is better though I hate using it since I need to use remote desktop and it is rather expensive.

[Sebastian-Roth]

Removing a client from the domain is possible even now. Just change name and domain for this host in the web UI (e.g. just put an underscore at the end like hostname_) and then watch the fog-client do it's work. It will remove the client from the domain and then reboot. Just switch off the machine at this point, change back the hostname plus domain and schedule an upload task. Done. After the client finishes the upload and boots into windows again it will rename, reboot and finally re-join the domain. I've tested this, it does work properly!

For the rest, how do you think we should integrate this functionality within FOG. Would it be a checkbox on the "schedule upload task page", like what we have with the "schedule as debug task". So the option would be "remove client from domain and re-join after upload"?? And what about the scripts? I have a hard time trying to think how we could generalize something like software un- and re-install in a script. What are your suggestions on how to integrate this?

[pcnate]

I just went in an tried this and it changed the domain for the entire group. I have the OU set at the group level and it seems to get overwritten doing other things as well. I suppose I could remove it from the group and then change the name. This is not a very clean way of doing it though.

My idea was to have the AD information left untouched and grayed out in the UI with a checkbox that shows it is in "pre capture" mode that would get reset after a capture task.