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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?"

1 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. User permissions to multi-site by burns210 · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Here is an off-shoot question. Don't mod off-topic, just ignore if you don't like the post.

    I work for the IT department of the second largest school district in Oregon. 15,000 workstations, 200-300 servers. Mostly 2k/XP workstations, with some 98 machines in the process of upgrading. Servers are 75% NT/2k/2003 25% Netware.

    We have 90 locations, about half or so of those locations(middle and high schools, some of the elementary schools, none at the department buildings) have dedicated SysAdmins for various support. Our IT department wants a web interface-based image server. The IT department(admins) should have full access to multi-ghost and manage(ghost, patch, bios/firmware upgrade would be cool) all machines, and then user accounts for the on-site SysAdmins to ghost the machines they administrate, but obviously not the ability to see/ghost another school's systems.

    The more automated the better. Remote client install for 2k/XP(the vast majority of our 15,000 machines). Pull profile for backups and restore, etc. Random other cool IT management stuff would be nice, but not at all necesary.

    We think the closest thing to this is ZenWorks, which we have in the longterm plans of implementing when upgrading of our servers are done. Currently all imaging is done hdd->hdd, individually.