Multicast Imaging for Mac OS X?

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?"

Comments

why not just net-boot them and forget about it?

[thenerdgod]

net booting with an XServe

Netrestore

[jfunkk99]

http://www.bombich.com/

We imaged 1500 Powerbooks in 4 days using an Xserve and NetRestore. The image was about 5 GB I believe and we averaged about 20 mins a machine with 25 going at once. There should be enough on the forums to get you started.

Re:Ghost 4 unix

[hubertf]

Ship me 1-2 of those G5s, and I'll port g4u to Mac.

- Hubert (author of g4u)

Re:..Or Radmind

[jps3]

In my lab, I will NetBoot my Macs to a NetRestore.nbi image, which points to a *.dmg file I make of my new setups base install (using Carbon Copy Cloner, or SuperDuper). The base install images is set up to run radmind on first boot to get all updates, add any apps needed, etc. Works well. I do not think Radmind is slow, unless the damned building netcam is on (the Dean installed it, I can't touch it, grr).