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Massively Updating to Mac OS X?

Posted by Cliff on from the hassle-free-installation-on-more-than-one-machine dept.

Zerocool3001 asks: "I work for a school in California that uses all Macintoshes. All of the machines have Mac OS 9 on them. We would like to upgrade to Ma OS X 10.2 and we have a net install server with disk images ready to install. However, it appears as though net installations of disk images is not possible in Mac OS 9. If you have any way to install a disk image over a large network to about 500-700 computers, we could definitely use the suggestions."

5 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. Drink from the well . . . by MaxwellStreet · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Instead of asking people here on Slashdot...

    I'm sure that for these kinds of numbers, in a high-profile installation... -someone- over at Apple would be interested in making things go smoothly for you.

    I'd imagine that you could get help directly from Apple - and probably better than anything you'll find here.

    1. Re:Drink from the well . . . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful


      Youre assuming they paid for those licenses ;o)

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  2. Netboot by nocomment · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Wouldn't it be cheaper and worth the effort to do a netboot setup? THen you jsut go around to all the OS 9 machines and set the startup disk to be netboot (or whatever they call it I forget) and reboot :-).

    Of course you might want to invest in gigabit ethernet and some switches at the same time. Other than that, you'd have to around to each machine individually with the OS X CD.

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  3. Are you sure you want to do this? by Unregistered · · Score: 2, Insightful

    As much as i loathe OS 9, i've found that most boxes form the OS9 day run kinda slow w/ OSX installed. And more so, they take forever to boot. it's my opinion that it's more than woth the trade off to work woth OSX(mmm...), but make sure that everyone who will be using these agrees. if they're alwaysd on, though i'd say go for it.

  4. Apple Software Restore & Carbon Copy Cloner by luciuskwok · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is all really clearly detailed at Apple Software Restore. The idea is to create a bootable disk image with all the software (apps, fonts, etc.) you want to deploy, put it on a file server, and then boot into the target machine with a FireWire disk or CD with Mac OS X on it. This is so you can go into Terminal and use the command-line tool to run 'asr' to install the disk image.