Cloning. (macs that is)
First, I just want to say that I am a regular reader of these forums and love them. Its always fun to read the threads and gain some knowledge.
But on to the real matter here. I am a 19 year old Mac Technician at a College in Pittsburgh. We have around 250 Macs in our institution. In September we moved all of our machines to OS X. Since we had been given the order on extremely short notice (we were given the order to move to OS X in a time frame of only one week with only 3 staff on the Mac side of the Technology department) it was a rushed job and we regretted not having had the time to prepare (though completely out of our control). So we had gotten our new Xserves and set up everything and quickly got a master image put together to clone the 250 and some odd macs using Carbon Copy Cloner and Firewire Target Disk mode and basically just daisy chaining down the line till all the Macs in a lab were done, then we would move on to the next. This was all quite the task to be done with only 3 people and a week from the installation of the XServe and the cloning on the client side. Shortly after we had noticed some flaws in our original master relating to quircky software installs and such. Everything runs but we were constantly running into problems with managment issues and such that we slowly began to iron out and fix, but obviously this had to be done on individual machines at a time so it was quite the frustrating task, but we got it done.
So to get more to the point, Christmas break is coming soon and we will have time to finally remaster all of the Macs over again with a new image we have been working on. It is absolutely perfect with no flaws and has been thuroughly tested over the past few months (something we obviously had no time for before, and what we very much welcomed this time around).But we would really like to make the process a little more automated so we can spend time on doing other things so all of the break doesn't have to be spent doing it all by hand. So we began to look into using NetBoot to clone the Macs in a lab to cut down on our time spent cloning. And it would help us have a faster way to restore computers in a lab without having to go through a manual process. We had considered doing NetBoot in the way it was designed and not having an OS on the hard drive, but at this time, 250 macs is just too much of a strain on the few X Serves we have and its just not a viable option right now. But we have been trying to get good solid information on how to master all of the macs through the network, but we haven't found any concrete info. So, we were wondering if any of you have experience with this and could give us, or point us in the direction of getting this working. We have our netboot server up and running and it does connect to an image we made but it takes FOREVER on one Mac and never gets past the startup screen, and we are not sure how to get the image to stay on the hard drive. Our contact at Apple also said we would have problems because our image is much over 2 Gigabytes which supposedly isn't yet supported by netboot because our school uses many different applications, including classic applications that we HAD to include in our image, despite our protests, because of Faculty complaints. So our image is running about 6 gigs and we really want to get this working. But others have told me that this isn't an issue anymore. So please, if you could help, we would appreciate it. Sorry about the long winded-ness of this post, but I wanted to include as much info as possible so that we could get the most help as possible. Thanks much.
[ 11-29-2002: Message edited by: The Letter Exchange ]</p>
But on to the real matter here. I am a 19 year old Mac Technician at a College in Pittsburgh. We have around 250 Macs in our institution. In September we moved all of our machines to OS X. Since we had been given the order on extremely short notice (we were given the order to move to OS X in a time frame of only one week with only 3 staff on the Mac side of the Technology department) it was a rushed job and we regretted not having had the time to prepare (though completely out of our control). So we had gotten our new Xserves and set up everything and quickly got a master image put together to clone the 250 and some odd macs using Carbon Copy Cloner and Firewire Target Disk mode and basically just daisy chaining down the line till all the Macs in a lab were done, then we would move on to the next. This was all quite the task to be done with only 3 people and a week from the installation of the XServe and the cloning on the client side. Shortly after we had noticed some flaws in our original master relating to quircky software installs and such. Everything runs but we were constantly running into problems with managment issues and such that we slowly began to iron out and fix, but obviously this had to be done on individual machines at a time so it was quite the frustrating task, but we got it done.
So to get more to the point, Christmas break is coming soon and we will have time to finally remaster all of the Macs over again with a new image we have been working on. It is absolutely perfect with no flaws and has been thuroughly tested over the past few months (something we obviously had no time for before, and what we very much welcomed this time around).But we would really like to make the process a little more automated so we can spend time on doing other things so all of the break doesn't have to be spent doing it all by hand. So we began to look into using NetBoot to clone the Macs in a lab to cut down on our time spent cloning. And it would help us have a faster way to restore computers in a lab without having to go through a manual process. We had considered doing NetBoot in the way it was designed and not having an OS on the hard drive, but at this time, 250 macs is just too much of a strain on the few X Serves we have and its just not a viable option right now. But we have been trying to get good solid information on how to master all of the macs through the network, but we haven't found any concrete info. So, we were wondering if any of you have experience with this and could give us, or point us in the direction of getting this working. We have our netboot server up and running and it does connect to an image we made but it takes FOREVER on one Mac and never gets past the startup screen, and we are not sure how to get the image to stay on the hard drive. Our contact at Apple also said we would have problems because our image is much over 2 Gigabytes which supposedly isn't yet supported by netboot because our school uses many different applications, including classic applications that we HAD to include in our image, despite our protests, because of Faculty complaints. So our image is running about 6 gigs and we really want to get this working. But others have told me that this isn't an issue anymore. So please, if you could help, we would appreciate it. Sorry about the long winded-ness of this post, but I wanted to include as much info as possible so that we could get the most help as possible. Thanks much.
[ 11-29-2002: Message edited by: The Letter Exchange ]</p>
Comments
but it is my recommendation that Network Install is the way to go to image all the macs off the network.since you have 2 xserves i would do them room by room and just copy the same image to both servers. the max load it can take is 50 but with the way the rooms are setup at my school the max in a room is 35 at most. the network install technology is still new and apple is sucking right now on improving it but with work you can get it going. the way iam setting mine up is that iam using CCC <a href="http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html"; target="_blank">http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html</a>; to image a master image of OSX and using mostly X native apps except for Quark the bastards. the new version of CCC can create a netboot image. then all you have to do is convert the netboot image to a netinstall image. then the 2gb which seems it like a 2gb read-write diskimage .dmg thing is ok just do it over with the right apps it will fit trust me. and if all else fails i hope you have experince with apples ASR. and just create a multi-cd installer.
<strong>So to get more to the point, Christmas break is coming soon and we will have time to finally remaster all of the Macs over again with a new image we have been working on. It is absolutely perfect with no flaws and has been thuroughly tested over the past few months (something we obviously had no time for before, and what we very much welcomed this time around).But we would really like to make the process a little more automated so we can spend time on doing other things so all of the break doesn't have to be spent doing it all by hand.
[ 11-29-2002: Message edited by: The Letter Exchange ]</strong><hr></blockquote>
Open Terminal.app on a machine running Mac OS 10.2.2 and type "man asr"
<a href="http://www.apple.com/server/netboot.html"; target="_blank">http://www.apple.com/server/netboot.html</a>;
[quote] from above:
We have our netboot server up and running and it does connect to an image we made but it takes FOREVER on one Mac and never gets past the startup screen, and we are not sure how to get the image to stay on the hard drive.<hr></blockquote>