Advanced Fog features

Fog is a complex piece of software and while we’ve covered the core feature of the server, it ships with several more. The Fog server is scalable and can manage large networks spread over multiple locations in the same building or around the world. It allows you to arrange hosts into several groups for easier management. One of the most useful features of the Fog server, especially for admins of larger networks, is the multicast ability. Using this feature you can deploy multiple machines in one go.

However, to use this feature successfully you’ll need to make sure your Fog host has enough computational and network resources to stream multiple images simultaneously. For such larger networks, you can have multiple Fog installations configured as storage servers. These storage servers share images and take the load of the main Fog server when imaging computers. The distributed storage servers also speed up unicast transfers and introduce data redundancy.

Besides the two most important Fog server tasks that we’ve covered in this tutorial (and that’s uploading and downloading images), you can create several different tasks for any of the hosts in Fog’s repository. For instance, you can run the Debug task which boots a Linux image to a Bash prompt for fixing any boot errors. You can also create a task to remote wipe hosts, to recover files with TestDisk or to scan for viruses with ClamAV.

The Fog server can also install and manage printers on the network. Depending on the operating system on the host you can also use the server to track user access to computers by their Windows usernames and automatically log off users and shut down the computer after a specified period of inactivity. Fog can also install and uninstall apps via snapins.