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

It's called 'dd'.

[aminorex]

You can boot a CD, mount a network drive, and
dd a disk image over the hard drive. I recommend
a Knoppix PPC live cd.

Easy Clone Instructions

[jhrizz]

I use this method at a high turn around, needed-it-yesterday rental house. Granted I only need to do about 10-15 systems at a time, but this non-automated way to 'Clone' Mac systems may be helpful. Server: - OS X 10.3 Server NetBooting 10.3 with Diskless option selected - A network accessible shared folder. Client: Any Mac configured exactly the way you want it. To make the Master image: NetBoot your template machine and use Disk Utility to 'Make Image' of the host computers HD - Save image to your shared folder. NetBoot your target system. Make accessible your disk image that you saved in your shared folder. Use Disk Utility to format its hard drive. Use Disk Utility to do a 'Restore' using the image as the 'Source' and the Mac HD as the target. Wash, rinse, repeat. Things to consider: Machine specific components, processor speed differences, etc. Make new images for different processor class machines. (i.e., Dual 1 Gig has much different architecture than a Dual 1.25, but the 1.25 is very similar to the 1.42 (FW800 on both). Safest bet is to make an image for each config/machine variation. A 2 gig image takes me about 20 Minutes. Be mindful that system speed and disk configuration will greatly affect performance. For more speed: RAID 0 For redundancy: RAID 1 For balance: RAID 5 Your network architecture also plays a vital role, especially when attempting simultaneous restores. Most all Macs come with GigE now. If your IT budget can swing it, I would highly recommend picking one up (a GigE switch that is). Even if you use some of the other software recommendations, hard disk speed, network architecture and superfluous demand on the system will all play a big role the time it takes to complete. There are many ways to stream line this process, however this is what I need and this is what I do. I am always looking for new ways to automate and make easier the restore process. Already have Ghosting down to a science on the PC side of things. ---- It's live long and PROSPER, not THRIVE...

One Link Here Should Help

[catdevnull]

I'm sure someone already posted this, but you'll probably find everything you need to know here:

http://www.macosxlabs.org/

No offense to the slashdotters, but you'll probably find this link more useful than any of the posts here. It's chock full-o-goodness with people who make it happen in real-world situations rather than an unruly group of independent pundits.

Hope this helps!

.