Massively Updating to Mac OS X?

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."

Comments

CFEngine, or maybe remote (shared) drive

[garyebickford]

A couple of years ago CFEngine seemed like a good way to go to maintain large LANs, including not only OS but application updates. It became a GNU project. I haven't kept up, so I don't know present status. It did require initial installation of a small monitor tool on each machine. But that might be accomplished remotely by adding it to each machine's startup folder.

Staying with pure Apple methods, you might be able to add a network drive to each computer's environment, than remotely modify/replace the StartupDisk Control Panel to boot from the network drive, which would then run a script to wipe the main disk and install the new OS.