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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?"

5 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. NetRestore by huber · · Score: 5, Informative

    Netrestore http://www.bombich.com

  2. ..Or Radmind by huber · · Score: 5, Informative

    Radmind works fatastically. i use it to manage about 600 macs with different loadsets using the tls certificate feature. http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/radmind/

    1. Re:..Or Radmind by iradik · · Score: 5, Informative

      I agree. For many years radmind was the only robust solution for OS X. It is by far the most widely used for this task. Though radmind is slow. It will take 2-8 hours to update your computers from scratch. However, why does it matter? Plus radmind will allow you to push incremental upgrades in as little as two minutes. It's somewhat difficult to learn, but the radmind user list is really really great. Most of the people on the list run big university labs or corporate labs and I find them to be really smart and creative. Check it out: http://www.radmind.org/

      Thoug I have to say sometimes radmind sucks, like if you go from Jaguar to Panther it can break. Though generally for minor system updates and security fixes it's okay. This is why you TEST! And if you need a full restore you use apple software restore or netrestore from Mike Bombich. I like that guy: http://www.bombich.com/ But then you need an Mac OS X Server http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/ as I recall, in which case, you might as well by an xserve http://www.apple.com/xserve/ since it comes with the software. But again you will only need Bombich once a year; so you can just visit every machine with a cd ad it might be as effective as all the ASR which I found to be difficult to implement. We had to get an Apple Engineer to set it up for us. heh.

  3. macosxlabs by brianmed · · Score: 5, Informative

    macosxlabs has articles and whatnot about this, i believe:

    From the site:
    Welcome to the web site for the Higher Education Mac OS X Lab Deployment Initiative. Our goal is to simplify the task of installing and maintaining Mac OS X in a computer lab.
  4. Ghost 4 unix by fok · · Score: 5, Informative

    From the site:

    g4u ("ghost for unix") is a NetBSD-based bootfloppy/CD-ROM that allows easy cloning of PC harddisks to deploy a common setup on a number of PCs using FTP."

    http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

    --
    \m/