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Multicast Imaging for Mac OS X?

Posted by Cliff on from the REAL-server-PUSH dept.

ATomkins asks: "The school where I work has 128 new G5s which will be set up in a couple of labs. We want to completely re-image all G5s at least every semester. Ideally, we would want to use something like Ghost to push the image out to all the Macs at once; with Dell boxen, under similar circumstances, this takes about 20-30 minutes. Is there a viable alternative for OS X?" "So far, among other things, we've tried NetInstall and ARD2, which preformed horribly, taking over 200 minutes using GigE. Our best solution has been Carbon Copy Cloner over FW800, but that costs a lot in terms of labour. UDPCast over a Gentoo LiveCD image (distributed via NetInstall) seemed promising, but is being troublesome.

Assuming block-level unicast isn't an option, does anyone have any ideas how we can make this more automated?"

2 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. 200 Minutes over Gigabit? by waffffffle · · Score: 2, Insightful

    How big is the image? How big is your Dell image?

  2. You're doing something seriously wrong by plsuh · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You didn't say if 200 minutes is per machine or for the whole shooting match; If it's for the whole school then 3.5 hours of work once per semester is no big deal, give it a rest. You'll waste more time tweaking it than you save doing it. If it's per machine then you're doing something seriously wrong.

    I manage a lab of 30 machines, and we use NetRestore to wipe them on a weekly basis from a G4 XServe. The switch is only 100 Base-T, so we're bandwidth limited to about 5 or 6 machines at a time. Even so, imaging one machine takes about 10 minutes, and the whole lab is done in under an hour. If the switch had a GigE uplink for the XServe then the whole process would take twenty minutes.

    Check out the numerous links that others have posted to macosxlabs.org and asr, and good luck with it.

    --Paul