One of our clients is a local school with about 100 student computers.  All of the student computers require the same software setup: Windows, Office, ESET Anti-virus, a few learning applications, and Google Chrome. This, of course, is the prime time when multicast computer imaging software comes into the fore.

We tried Norton Ghost a few years ago, then moved to Clonezilla for a bit, but both seemed a little clunky.  Then one day, Roger found FOG.  FOG is an uninventive acronym which stands for “Free Opensource Ghost”.  FOG is only at version 0.32, and hasn’t been updated since 2011, but the program is really quite mature.  There are a couple of misleading error messages, but overall it’s pretty good… However, when it came time to deploy images via multicast, things got pretty gnarly.  That’s what this tutorial is for.

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