Best Way to Image and Deploy Dual-Boot Macintosh?

macpulse asks: "What is the best way to image and deploy dual-boot Intel Macintosh desktops in an Educational environment? Our organization is getting ready to purchase dozens of new Intel Macs for each campus and we're not sure how to proceed. With Windows XP and Dell, we've simply used Symantec's Enterprise Ghost to deploy our images. Playing with the test Intel Macs we have, we are unable to get Ghost to work with the Mac. I've also played with Bombich's NetRestore product (which is FOSS!) but without much success. I'm curious how my fellow readers have resolved this issue. Thanks!"

Comments

What are you having trouble with?

[delirium of disorder]

As long as all your hardware is the same, deploying a uniform image should be possible using simple tools that have been a part of any *nix system for decades. I don't see why you would need to purchase "enterprise" anything. First install the OSes you want on one the Macs (OSX and Linux, Solaris and OpenBSD, whatever). Configure everything as you want it to be on the image. Then boot that Mac using some medium other than the disk you just did the install to (cd boot, network boot (I imagine x86 macs can use PXE just like most intel systems)). Mount a network drive and use dd to make an image of the disk you did the install on. Then write a script for doing the re-imaging. All it would need to do would be to mount that network drive and dd the image from there to the disk. You could do checksums to make sure the transfer worked if you want to get fancy. Store this script on the pxe server or boot cd, or whatever you choose to use to boot the Macs that are getting imaged. You can even set it to autorun so all anyone doing the re-imaging has to do is put in the boot cd and reboot, or connect the Mac to be re-imaged to the same LAN as the networked server and reboot. This seams like pretty much what you would do when setting up imaging for PCs, Sun workstations, whatever. Is there something in particular about Macs that make them more difficult to work with? (I'm not a Mac user)

DD

[Bios_Hakr]

At my office, we have a master image of our desktop configuration. The image sits in a Debian box next to my desk.

When we get a new PC, we remove the drive and drop it into an external USB/IDE/SATA enclosure and connect ti to the Debian box. We DD the image onto the drive. It usually takes less than an hour per drive.

We can also image a drive across the LAN, but it's slower and we have to be present at the user's computer to boot off a KNOPPIX disc.

We have played with the idea of creating a DVD that has a cut-down debian distro and the image file. Then we can just drop in the restore disc and reboot. Come back an hour later and we're done.

You could also drop the image on the portable drive and use a boot CD to image PCs without opening them.

Apple System Restore, Mac OS X Server, and NetBoot

[Chris Hanson]

Mac OS X includes a feature called Apple System Restore. You can access it through Disk Utility and use it to create an image of a partition or a whole disk, and replicate that image to another partition or whole disk - even over a network. There's also a command-line version in /usr/sbin/asr. I think Mac OS X Server will even let you NetBoot a system on your network and have it automatically restore its local disk from an ASR image.

I have not done this, but I assume you'd be able to set up a system exactly as you want it to be set up - with both Mac OS X and Windows partitions - and create an ASR image from that, which you can then restore and use at will.

Don't Partition

[ktappe]

We had pondered this same question when we first got our Intel-based Macs. Then we tried Parallels and never looked back. It solves several problems:

• No need to partition, an action which (to our knowledge) cannot be automated over netboot.
• Both OSes can be included in a single, NetRestore-able disk image.
• No need for end users to reboot to change OSes.

So I strongly suggest you re-examine your decision to use BootCamp, and instead examine Parallels. By switching to Parallels you can use well-established tools such as NetRestore, RadMind, and other off-the-shelf solutions.

I also must disagree with one of the other responders who recommended Target disk mode. While this is good for a few computers (and is a great tool for making your source .dmg you'll deploy using the above tools), it does not work well for reimaging hundreds of Macs that are widely distributed across a campus. It requires that each technician be equipped with a firewire drive, which tend to grow legs. Also, more and more security-conscious companies (and colleges) are locking down computers so that neither USB nor Firewire drives can be used and/or forbidding the use of such devices. And then you'll have the problem of keeping each Firewire drive up to date with exactly the same image instead of just updating a single, master .dmg on the server as you can when using NetRestore.

True, it can be tricky to get NetBoot to work across subnets, but we got around that by putting multiple NICs in our NetBoot XServe, one for each subnet. (Yes, we tried Bombich's boot-across-subnets solution but could not get it to work, probably because of how our routers are configured.)